Good Email Guide

Introduction

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University of Galway staff and students rely heavily on email to communicate within our university community and with the outside world. While other communication channels like Blackboard and MS Teams are growing in popularity, email remains important for staff, in particular, when they need an easy, reliable, traceable and asynchronous means of sharing information and files.

However, the overuse of email can lead to digital overload. This can lead to a number of negative outcomes such as stress, anxiety, miscommunication, indecision or poor decision making, procrastination and other counter-productive avoidance behaviour. We all need to be mindful of the impact of an excessively email-driven culture and make smart choices about what, when and how to communicate with others.

Increasingly, we are accessing our emails on multiple personal and work devices, and it is therefore all the more important to use emails productively and efficiently to enable our people to maintain a reasonable work-life balance and to disconnect from work.

Like all forms of communication, the way we express ourselves in emails is influenced by our personality, experience and articulacy, the mood we’re in and the pressure we’re under. We might inadvertently use email in a way that causes irritation or offence to the reader. It is important that we are all aware of how best to use emails to ensure that our university remains a positive, productive and respectful working and learning environment.

For the institution, good email etiquette helps maintain professionalism and protect from liability in the context of legal cases.

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