Email Or Phone Call?

When you open your computer after a meeting and find 84 emails that have been sent to you in the past two hours, do you groan and long for an old-fashioned email? What is even more exciting is when you receive an email that has been forwarded to you from your manager that began more than 10 days before. Your manager has asked, “What do you recommend?” Now you have to read several pages of emails to get the history of the issue. Now the telephone is looking good. I think there can be balance in our use of emails, telephone calls, or brief meetings.

So how will you decide when to use email, phone calls, or a quick meeting? It probably depends on several factors: time, number of people, importance of record of information transfer, or your comfort in emails or phone calls. If your boss is very busy with meetings, then it may be difficult to get a few minutes to meet and it may be easier to email the question. On the other hand, it may be more efficient to get a couple of minutes and quickly ask the question rather than having someone read a long email.

You should probably consider how many people you would need to contact before you decide to make that telephone call. It may be more efficient to email several people at once than to try to arrange a conference call. Sometimes an email is more efficient if you need to have a record of the information that is being transmitted. This will allow you to go back and refer to the information. Most people are very comfortable with email and it is important to remember that some of your colleagues like the personal contact in a brief meeting or a telephone call.