Better Business Email Collaboration: Tips and Tricks

Business email collaboration is important for team productivity. As long as email continues to be the global standard for internet communication, it’s guaranteed that businesses will continue to see email as the standard for business communication. Companies will increase their reliance on email and other online communication channels as the workforce gradually transfers to remote or hybrid working environments. 

Given this trend, refining procedures for business email collaboration is vital for the success of current and future business endeavors. Increasing collaboration opportunities presents a challenge to all communication modes, but particularly so for asynchronous channels like email.  

Key Factors of Business Email Collaboration 

Unified Information

It’s important to ensure that all team members have the ability to pull important information from the same source: a singular truth specific to a project or organization. This helps establish transparency and project timelines, which allow teams to expand collaborative opportunities among all their members.

A collaborative email inbox helps teams unify information in one location. From that source of truth, users can break down information into a variety of categories using key Gmail features. Gmelius offers a wide variety of essential features and integrations to help your team organize their inboxes and encourage collaboration, all from inside their individual Gmail accounts. Sign up for a demo today!

Diverse Contributions

It’s also important to make use of all your teammates' various skill sets. The benefit of working with several team members on one project isn’t just to ensure it finishes on time. A team made up of members with different areas of expertise encourages creativity. When a diverse group with multiple worldviews provides input, the different proficiencies tend to supplement and complement one another in a way that’s entirely different from homogeneous team dynamics. Diverse contributions add to a project’s eventual success because they are not bound by a single set of prescribed actions. 

Clear Lines of Communication

A shared email inbox establishes a level of accountability for team members collaborating on projects. Everyone can access the necessary information, view everyone’s progress on tasks, ask questions, or add context on multiple channels. This allows team members to optimize their individual skill sets yet remain informed of all project developments through the seamless communication of a shared inbox. Increasing business email collaboration can also create a more stable work environment in remote or virtual office settings. This stability, in turn, can further increase morale, productivity, and teamwork. 

What Does a Successful Collaborative Email Look Like?

Just as there are many benefits to having a collaborative email for virtual teams, there are just as many different ways to create a successful one. Utilizing Gmail features and analytics can help you create successful collaborative emails.

The most successful business email collaborations use available features to organize workflows and cut out busy work. They also encourage collaboration by linking multiple forms of communication. Gmelius seamlessly syncs other communication apps and software—such as Slack or Zoom—from inside individual Gmail accounts. 

This encourages online collaboration by organizing all your communication channels on one familiar platform. Equipped with these tools, companies can encourage participation by establishing procedures for business email collaboration. Here are a few procedures that encourage collaboration, especially in virtual work environments:

• Work within a solid communication channel that everyone is comfortable with using, such as email
• Make sure important information is available to everyone 
• Operate from a workspace that connects employees 
• Use email notes to add important details to conversations

Tips and Tricks: Important Tools for Successful Collaborative Emails

1. Templates

Your team can create seamless communication across the board by using templates for questions, responses, and more. Creating templates using a collaborative process gives every team member a chance to shine in developing the best possible template. Writing them in such a way creates a sense of unity out of individual voices. It also gives team leaders a chance to get each member’s buy-in and establish a sense of project ownership—individually as well as for the team as a whole. 

Templates are perfect for business email collaboration because they lend a sense of cohesion to the team. If all recipients receive the same information, it keeps everyone informed and minimizes confusion. 

Templates can be used for:

• Signatures 
• Repetitive Responses to Common Questions
• Important Company-Wide Information to Add to Every Response
• Monthly Reports

While templates can be used for numerous reasons, it’s best to limit them to the most repetitive tasks. If there are too many templates and they are not categorized properly, it can take more time to find the correct one than just writing out a manual response. Templates are meant to cut down the amount of time for sending an accurate response.

2. Email Notes

Email notes are another great way to implement better business email collaboration within your teams. The margins on the side of the email give your teams and employees the ability to @mention one another in a related message. This creates

faster collaboration and seamless behind-the-scenes communication to finish projects and close tasks in a timely manner.

3. Workspace Automation

Team managers can easily update multiple assignments at once with a workflow automation tool. This tool can automate the workflow so your team managers have the ability to focus on other tasks instead of wasting time on busy work. 

Ways to use an automated workflow tool:

• Automate Email Notes For Multiple Emails
• Set Time-Based Targets with SLA Rule
• Reply To Multiple Conversations With Automatic Replies
• Assign Conversations/Tasks to Employees

Although collaboration is important in many aspects of business, it’s especially important for companies that are transitioning to remote or virtual workspaces, or who have already made the change. It’s easy to encourage participation when you are in an office. The working environment is easily controllable when you can keep a close eye on your employees. 

With virtual workspaces, it’s much harder to control the environment and the amount of productivity from each employee. This is why virtual environments must encourage collaboration and participation to produce the best results. It also helps to provide insights and analytics for different scenarios, such as determining key performance indicators (KPIs), finding bottlenecks, and researching response times. 

The benefits of virtual working environments—like flexible hours, a relaxed dress code, and zero commute—far outweigh the challenges, like scheduling difficulties, fewer personal interactions, and lack of oversight. Employers and team members can improve communication through better business email collaboration practices, like working from familiar channels with centrally organized information according to mutually agreed upon procedures. Implementing features like templates and email notes further encourages collaboration because it offers users a variety of communication channels, synchronous and asynchronous alike, from which to choose. 

Whether your business email collaborations take place in a fully virtual environment or in a face-to-face office, Gmelius can help improve your team’s collaborative functions to encourage productivity and engagement. Check out our features and integrations and learn how Gmelius is built to improve team communication and collaboration. Ready to get started? Sign up today!