answer06

How is organizational communication altered by increasing use of email?

Communication is difficult enough to perform in a face to face fashion, or in writing in general, but written communication by way of email and other typed electronic communication introduces special considerations for organizational communication. I want to focus on 5 negative alterations, followed by 5 positive alterations to organizational communication.

1. Hundreds of emails stacking up can induce stress due to the impression real or not of an increased workload. When you open your inbox to find a new series of 100 emails, all of which might be perceived to contain a task, even if that task is simply deletion, it can have a depleting effect on productivity-morale. 2. Personal emails and work emails sometimes get mixed, making it harder to maintain a clearly separated work/life balance. If a worker decides to use their work email for personal purposes, which many do, the mixture of work related tasks in the same line of sight with personal endeavors and notes can create an environment where someone feels that even when they are not working, they are working. 3. Email is missing (despite emoticons) clear nonverbal communication cues present in other forms of communication, and often essential for emotional content of sensitive issues. It is especially easy via email to have sarcasm, humor, and other human emotional conveyances that come across seamlessly in person be misconstrued, miscommunicated, and read in another emotional voice by others via email. 4. Email is permanent, irrevocable, indelible, and potentially insecure. You can not often, without very special privileges, unsend an email. Worse yet, without special protections missing in many email systems and networks, email can be captured openly by people who are sharing your network. It is imperative that workers use the "New York Times" rule: If you wouldn't want to see it on the pages of the New York Time, you should refrian from putting it in your email. 5. Legitimate email competes with illegitimate email. Spam, or unsolicited email about ideas or items that you may or may not have an interest in, clog our email systems due to the open way in which email is sent. It is a problem that people have sought to resolve satisfactorily for years, but which increases as a problem each year for many email administrators.

1. Email is a quick, relatively reliable service. Email sends messages in seconds, is one of the most reliable and tested systems of communication, and has become a staple of communication for organizations across the world. 2. Email is ubiquitous, and very often free. Email really is everywhere, and even if you do not run a server of your own, there are hundreds of ways in which you can get an email address for free, so that you can communicate with others. 3. Email is highly portable and supports sustainability efforts. A trillion messages in an email system can be held in a box an inch high and a foot deep. It can often be from across the world within seconds, sorted and searched in seconds, and replied to in seconds, with no charges for access to the system itself (though connectivity may be a cost). The same can not be said for paper based communication, verbal-phone based communication, and certainly not face to face communication. 4. Email is taggable, fileable, and often human readable. Emails contain far more than the content of their messages today, as they can contain metadata, be associated with like messages, be analyzed and searched en masse, and be essentially freely archived. Also, emails are often stored as simple human readable text, and as a result, they can be moved from one system to another without limits found in proprietary storage systems. 5. Email has allowed for the introduction of other communication formats. Google Wave, a new communication platform that is in limited release builds upon the basic premise of email, but extends it to allow for real time discussion, real time collaborative document editing, widget based extensions that extend the functionality beyond that of the original designers, and social networking, allowing co workers, friends, and observers to maintain and confirm relationships online. Without email as a basis, it would be unimaginable.