Is email central to the running of your business? For many of us, the answer is yes. With that in mind, we wanted to provide you with some useful Outlook email management tips. These can help you avoid app overload and improve your productivity, but also ensure accurate records management and provide employees with the modern user experience they have come to expect.

But first…

We know that for many organizations, email is at the heart of everything they do. Whether that is internal communications or external correspondences, email is how work is completed. Naturally, it comes as no surprise that a significant part of our days is spent in our email client. For ourselves, our customers, and millions of people all over the world, Outlook is the email client of choice. In this post, we look at Outlook, and how the Office 365 suite with SharePoint can drive email management success.

4 Outlook email management tips

1. Make searching for documents easy

The amount of time people spend searching for emails has been written about a lot. Harvard Business Review found that we waste 30 minutes per day re-reading emails over and over again. The biggest trigger is when people start searching for an old email. One answer to this problem is the use of metadata, especially for organizations using SharePoint for document and email management.

When metadata is correctly added, it can make surfacing emails much easier. There are plenty of situations in which this is essential:

• Collaborating on work with colleagues
• Managing long-running cases and clients
• Compliance audits
• Referring to previous correspondences with a client/customer
• Picking up a client’s case from a colleague when they are on holiday
• FOI requests

How harmon.ie helps

harmon.ie ensures you can meet all these requirements and fulfil these obligations every time, which will make it easy to discover old email in SharePoint when you need them. It does all this without requiring you to leave Outlook.

2. Let your users take action immediately

When it comes to managing your email, carrying out admin as soon as possible is key. The easiest thing to do is to do things quickly, at the point of receiving or sending an email. Otherwise, important information locked inside emails can quickly be forgotten about or lost.

Organizations need to make email management as easy as possible for their employees, because when the right thing is the easy thing, users are much more likely to carry out the desired action. This way you can avoid issues like lost emails, siloed information, multiple versions of documents, and non-compliance with internal or external standards or regulations.

How harmon.ie helps

harmon.ie’s Outlook sidebar provides a wide range of functionality for knowledge workers in their email client. Without having to lose focus on core work, workers can capture, classify, store, and discover emails and important documents directly from Outlook.

3. Avoid app overload

Today, many knowledge workers suffer from app overload – where the need to move between apps actually inhibits their productivity and distracts from the task at hand. What you should be doing is giving users the ability to capture emails as documents of record from anywhere they work – from Outlook, from Office apps, or from a mobile device.

A great example of this is case management. Case workers will spend the majority of their day in email, receiving and sending a constant stream of emails with clients. However, important documents relating to cases are saved elsewhere – notably in their document management system, SharePoint. But also internal communications occur in Microsoft Teams and other apps. Switching between all these apps can prove a distraction, removing the context of the work you are focused on, and it can take time to figure out where the information you need is stored.

How harmon.ie helps

With the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook, users can search for important documents without having to switch apps. They can quickly attach a document into an email they are sending to a client. Also, they can drag and drop emails received from clients into SharePoint and apply metadata at the point of receiving/sending an email.

But, alternatively, if users spend most of their time in Office apps, then the harmon.ie app for Office can offer SharePoint functionality in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

4. Organize emails with ease

Every day, knowledge workers are bombarded with emails, instant messages, documents, notifications, meeting requests, and so on. This can make it impossible to focus on the task at hand and find relevant information when it is required.

How harmon.ie helps

harmon.ie’s solution helps knowledge workers organize information consistently across their organization, by putting an emphasis on correct storage in SharePoint. For example, the solution recommends where emails should be filed so that they can easily be found later.

Now it’s your turn

Getting email management right can dramatically improve the productivity of your business. These have been our four Outlook email management tips for success. Use harmon.ie to help knowledge workers manage their emails efficiently.

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