One characteristic that almost all highly-effective principals have in common is the ability to communicate in an efficient and professional manner. Even if you’re not a natural-born communicator, developing and implementing (and always following) a very structured system for interacting with your faculty and staff can greatly improve your effectiveness. And that’s especially true when it comes to emails! So here are some specific tips related to that ubiquitous form of communication …
1) Every email from an administrator should be extremely clear and concise. This not only makes the communication easier to understand, but it also forces you to clarify (and minimize) your instructions and expectations before sharing them … thus saving everyone involved from wasting time and effort.
2) Every email should contain a very focused title that summarizes the content. This will make it much easier for the reader to search for the information again later if needed. For example, “PTC Revision” is much better than “Changes for this Friday.”
3) Emails should only be sent to the specific staff and/or faculty members to which the content directly applies. Mass emails containing information that is irrelevant to the receiver will cause them to eventually begin ignoring most communication from that source. Note this problem is exacerbated when there are many such emails! The general rule of thumb is that except for school-wide memos (which should be few), or the campus newsletter (if you have one), no one should receive an email that does not require a timely action or response from that individual or targeted group.
4) So without email, what’s the best way to share intra-school information? To minimize the number of emails needed, most general information can instead be posted to the school’s Learning Management System (like Schoology). This would include items like PD training slides, test administration information, substitute teacher coverage, events flyers, drill schedules, and so forth. Student discipline can also be posted here, preferably in a single spreadsheet with multiple tabs. This highly-organized, easy-retrieval area will soon become the “go to” reference source for you and your staff.
Please note that once such a system is established, your teachers can quickly be trained to access it daily and respond as needed. This also makes it much easier for you to determine who has and has not completed specific tasks (without digging through multiple emails).
5) Unless an extreme emergency is involved (a danger to health or safety), do not email your team after hours. Today’s teachers desperately need a good work/life balance (as do you), and emailing on nights and weekends reinforces the unspoken and unreasonable expectation that education is a 24/7 job. If you have a thought that you want to send before you forget it, just make a note and send it first-thing Monday morning. As noted elsewhere in this Blog, numerous studies have shown that highly-effective schools carefully guard their teachers’ time.
6) Finally, minimize the number of people who are authorized to mass email the entire team. For example, this might be only the principal (or principals), lead counselor, school secretary (for the newsletter), and lead testing coordinator. No one else should have the ability to contact your entire team at once. And on a related note, remind your teachers that no one should ever “reply all” to an email blast! This just clutters up everyone’s inbox. If the recipient needs further clarification or if they have a question, they should respond only to the sender, not to the entire group.
This final tip is VITAL to running an efficient and effective organization. One study found that employee job satisfaction decreased significantly when internal email volume increased.1 Another study found that the overuse of email (even using “batching”) can lead to a depletion of cognitive resources and can trigger negative responses.2 These are just two of the numerous studies that show how the ongoing deluge of emails can negatively impact both productivity and morale.
SUMMARY
Here are the “rules of thumb” for effective email communication within your school …
- Essential Individual Information: Only send the email directly to the individual or group involved. This should be used primarily when you require a timely response or action.
- Essential Group Information: Send the email to the entire team, but limit this to items like a weekly principal memo. All other essential information should be imparted through an active LMS system (see #4 above).
- Non-Essential Group Information: Send the email to the entire team, but limit this to things like the weekly newsletter or photos. All other information should be handled as outlined above.
Finally, administrator emails should focus on only the key information that your team members need to hear, not just on what you want to say (which might not be concise). Ultimately, your goal should be to offer the kind of information and support that will help your team focus on their primary tasks rather than spending time wading through countless emails.
1 Kong R., Zhu, H., and Konstan, J. (2021). Learning to Ignore: A Case Study of Organization-Wide Bulk Email Effectiveness. In Proceedings of PACM HCI (CSCW). ACM, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449154
2 Wijngaards I, Pronk FR, Burger MJ. (2022). For whom and under what circumstances does email message batching work? National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8897209/