Improvement through/despite Emails

1 Email Guidelines

Guidelines for writing emails to the AMASA-ALL mailing list

Cooperative principle

Every email has to be written with strict accordance to the foreknowledge of all recipients.

Quantity

Principle: as long as necessary but as brief as possible.

1. The email has to convey the relevant information in a concise form, without any debaucheries or unnecessary additional information.

2. Each email has to be informative, but not more informative as necessary avoiding lengthy texts. Especially for emails with high urgency, this has to be followed.

3. Please keep also in mind that many project members read their emails on smartphones with a small display.

4. Shall different topics be conveyed, consider the possibility of additional emails because not more than two topics should be covered in one email.

Quality

1. All emails have to be structured well in order to strengthen the comprehensibility. Please use bullet points and subheadings instead of continuous text.

2. Relevant information has to be highlighted.

3. The topics (relevance for the work of the recipients) and the amount of work have to be evident.

4. Please avoid special characters which might cause problems.

Relevance

Which information is currently relevant for all AMASA members?

1. Before sending an email to AMASA-All, please consider if this email is interesting and relevant for all the AMASA members.

2. If you aren’t completely sure, send this email only to the known target persons with the request for forwarding it to interested parties.

Modality

1. In favour of the non-native speakers and in due consideration of the different cultural backgrounds, clear verbalisations are absolutely essential. Therefore, please dispense with dialect and colloquial language.

2. Please use specialized language carefully. Abbreviations and acronyms which are not as common as e.g. “TC” have to be explained.

3. For avoiding misunderstandings, be very careful with the usage of humor.

4. Please conform to the convention of spelling and proofread your email before sending.

Subject line

1. The subject line has to correspond with the content of the email and should contain the level of urgency (e.g. “asap”).

2. Keep the subject line as brief as possible but also as meaningful as possible. Only brief subject lines will be displayed completely in the inbox of the email program.

3. If you have enough space left, please add the name of the project: AMASA.WGxTC.Date.Minutes.

Forwarded emails

1. Please adapt the subject line as advised above and add a brief introduction to the forwarded email.

2. Especially for external emails forwarded to the AMASA mailing list, this has to be followed.

Attached files

1. According to the KM strategy, please send only links to documents on Alfresco and no attached files.

2. If you have to send files which are not on Alfresco, please keep the file size as small as possible and do not attach huge files.

Although created for this mailing list, any application of these guidelines to other emails within the AMASA project communication will be appreciated!

2 Corpus

1. Subject line: AMASA – Project Management TC DATE_draft agenda

Dear All,

Due to a few changes which have been made to the agenda for tomorrow’s project management TC, I have attached a new version of the draft agenda. Please let me know if there are any omissions, corrections or comments on the agenda.

Included in these changes are a revised authorship and acknowledgement guidelines document from the editorial committee.

Also, we have our first deliverable (the external website) deadline for the end of MONTH. Therefore, I have attached a copy of the FP7’s guidelines for reporting.

Please note that NAME will again be initiating this TC tomorrow at TIMEam (UK time).

Best regards,

SURNAME

1. Subject line: AMASA – message from SURNAME regarding content for website – please reply asap

Dear All,

As you know our first deliverable for the EC is the website and content, which must be submitted at the end of MONTH. SURNAME, SURNAME and SURNAME have been working flat out on this and have drafted content for each site. We now need you to do your bit. Please, please can the lead for each site make sure that some one is nominated to reply to SURNAME copied to SURNAME by Monday, with the completed text and details of staff, as requested by SURNAME and agreed by the Project management committee. SURNAME and SURNAME have filled in most of the form so it just needs each site and WP lead to check their parts and add the necessary details. We can change it and add to it later but the most important thing is to get it all back to SURNAME on Monday. Please make this a priority.

Thank you in anticipation

SURNAME

1. Subject line: AMASA – Further Guidance on MONTH Workshop

Hello everyone

Following our discussion at the teleconference this week, I wanted to provide some further financial guidance on the workshop in NAME in MONTH so that you can get back to NAME by Tuesday of next week with participation numbers.

The workshop programme assumes arrival on NUMBER MONTH and departure on NUMBER MONTH. Partners can therefore assume that the following costs will be met by the budget of the host institution:

Accommodation – four nights (DATES)

Meals – Breakfast on DATES, lunch on DATES and Dinner on DATES.

The only costs that are not funded by NAME are the local travel connections from the airport to the hotel. NAME has arranged the option of pick-up by a travel company for the approximate cost of NUMBER euros per person which would need to be met by the partner budgets of each institution.

As you can see the in-county arrangements are inclusive for the period DATES and so we would not expect any per diems to be claimed from partner budgets for those days with the exception of actual costs associated with travel connections and meals in transit.

The costs of the field trip will not be met by NAME. However given the programme of activities, we have decided that only part of the associated costs can be charged to the grant of each partner institution – the remaining costs will need to be met by individuals themselves or partner institutions if this is something that they would fund.

The costs that we accept being charged to the grant are those that are necessary for the business element of the trip which include the visit to the hospitals and the dinner with the management of NAME University. I think that it is reasonable to assume that the grant can cover accommodation for 1 night and meals for 1/2 days and travel costs included within NAME’s trip itemisation. I have asked NAME for the trip company to clearly separate the costs associated with the business side of the trip from the leisure activities. As a broad indication, partners can expect approximately NUMBER dollars(NUMBER euros) could be covered by NAME but the rest would need to be be paid personally. We will confirm the actual amount once we have agreed the separation of activities. We also would not expect per diems to be claimed during this period.

I hope that this clarification is useful in understanding the implications for your budget.

Best wishes

SURNAME

1. Subject line: Alfresco – we will start the invitation process again

Dear colleagues,

You all have received an invitation to the AMASA Alfresco Document Management System today but the login did not work. First of all sorry for that. Due to a problem based on switching from our test environment to the productive environment, the system has generated a wrong login path which was sent to you automatically.

We now together with our IT fixed this problem and will start the invitation process again during this evening.

Please use the login from this second invitation.

For the first entry you have to klick on the link which will be sent to you.

For all future entries please use the following address and username/password which will be communicated after the second invitation.

LINK

Best wishes,

SURNAME

1. Subject line: Introduction of New post doctoral at NAME

amasa-all

Dear All,

I have the pleasure to introduce Dr. SURNAME SURNAME LASTNAME to the rest of the AMASA team. SURNAME is a public Health Nurse with a PhD in Health systems from the University of NAME, NAME NAME. She will be interacting more with WGX and WGX. But she will be broadening her involvement as we move along.

Best regards

SURNAME

3 Newsletter

Zero Email

Emails are with all of us.

As studies show, managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails. Some of us AMASA members might be quite familiar with these numbers as they spend a similar amount of time per week with reading and writing emails. And how many emails do we receive per day that are absolutely not relevant for us – either at this point of time or not at all? Thousands of emails are sent around which will never been read. Are you sure, that you don’t miss a relevant email e.g. about a manuscript outline from AMASA within these hundreds of superfluous emails?

This email flood is an international known problem and several companies are working on different solutions.

One approach: Zero Email! The company Atos is working on removing all their internal email communication within the next 3 years. Atos is an international information technology services company with annual 2011 pro forma revenue of EUR 8.5 billion and 74,000 employees in 48 countries. They will keep the emails for their external communication (whereby they also try to reduce these) but not for the internal one. So in three years, all 74,000 employees will communicate with each other internally by using different communication media. Just imagine!

Already common use: Many companies already shift defined parts of their communication to social media and social software. Widespread social media for this field of application are communities (LinkedIn, Xing, Myspace) and Micro-Blogging (Twitter). Although these communication media are often used for the external communication, they also can be used for the internal one. Known examples for social software are e.g. Wikis, Blogs or Discussion forums – as our forum on Alfresco.

Don’t panic! There won’t be any plans (or even guidelines) for removing all our internal emails. But we should keep this approach in mind – for the external communication and for the internal communication as well. And we need to go on with improving our email communication.

The first step into this direction were the email guidelines.

Another step is shifting the discussions about our manuscript outlines to the discussion forum on Alfresco completely.

We need you for accomplishing this!

1. Please apply the e-mail guidelines which you can find here: LINK to Alfresco

2. Please contribute to the discussion forum for discussing about the manuscript outlines! You can find all these current discussions here: LINK to Alfresco

For more information and feedback – please feel free to contact Kristina (yes, also via email).