How You Can Make Your Team’s Email Systems Fun and Increase Productivity

Let’s face it, nobody loves composing and responding to emails, but company email systems are an indispensable part of getting work done.

However, full inboxes and clunky email systems can affect your team’s overall productivity by creating unnecessary distractions and causing delays or failures in communication.

So, how can you make your team’s email system fun and increase productivity? Keep reading for some great email management ideas that your whole team will love!

Creative Email Management Techniques Proven to Increase Productivity

Turn Your Email Threads Into Chats

Reading and replying to traditional email threads can feel outdated and cumbersome. Not only that but scrolling through long threads to find key information hurts productivity. To combat this and boost productivity, try turning your email threads into chat conversations. 

But…how exactly can you do this? Meet Spike, the conversational email app that turns your emails into simple chats. When you and your team sync your emails with Spike, every response in a thread appears as a new message bubble in a chat conversation. This allows you to read and reply to emails in a much more natural feeling way.

That’s not all Spike does, either. The app also lets you send voice messages, hold video meetings, create chat groups, and collaborate on notes, tasks, and to-do lists. Essentially, it turns your company’s email system into a fun, collaborative workspace.

Spike is available for both desktop and mobile devices, which makes it easy to seamlessly carry on email conversations from anywhere, whether you’re at your desk or on the go. The clean layout and smooth UI make using the app much more enjoyable than most email systems.

Create Templates and Canned Responses

If you look at all your past emails, you’re sure to notice patterns of similar emails that you’ve replied to with pretty much the same response over and over again. If you ask anyone else on your team, they’ve probably noticed the same.

To avoid writing out similar emails time and time again, create a database of email templates and canned responses that everyone on your team can access. For example, create a folder in a collaborative, cloud-based tool, like Google Drive.

Give everyone on your team access to the folder and ask each person to contribute one or two email templates and canned responses that could save them and others time in the future. Since it’s a collaborative project, people on your team can add to and improve upon all your templates and responses over time!

Give Everyone a Personal Email Assistant

Don’t worry; we don’t mean hire a real live personal email assistant for every person on your team — there’s an app for that! Boomerang is another handy email app that you can use with either Gmail or Outlook.

With the app’s built-in voice recognition software, you can tackle your inbox without having to go through it manually. For example, you can tell your new assistant to brief you on your new emails and estimate how long it will take to respond to them all, so you can schedule some time to deal with your emails when it works best.

The app also has all kinds of features to help you and your team stay productive without completely neglecting your emails, such as the ability to schedule recurring emails and set up reminders to send or reply to emails.

Reduce Reliance on Email Systems by Using Project Management Software

If you’re still primarily relying on emails to assign tasks, provide important project information, and stay on top of deadlines, you might want to consider shifting some of that reliance to a project management software platform.

Platforms like Monday.com, Asana, and Trello are all great for managing all your different projects and their individual tasks and keeping all the relevant information and deadlines in one place. Plus, moving tasks along with a Kanban-style board or checking them off a to-do list is way more fun than deleting or archiving emails!

For instance, instead of assigning someone on your team a task via a lengthy email with all the links and information they need to complete it, you can just create a task on a project board, add a description, attach any necessary files and links, then assign a deadline and a team member responsible for completing the task. 

Everyone can comment on tasks if they have questions or want to add more information, so everything is in one central location where everyone can see it. That way, nothing gets lost in long, repetitive email chains.

Our Final Thoughts

Most modern companies still rely on emails as a primary means of communication, especially when dealing with clients, partners, and others outside of the organization — and that’s totally fine!

However, if you feel like internal email communications are slowing down your team and hurting overall company productivity, it might be time to look for ways to make your email systems more fun and productive!

Try some of the creative email management techniques we discussed above to see what works best for you and your team.

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