Young’s Special e-mail charter

When Young’s Brewery examined e-mail usage among its workforce, it found that e-mail was used for the full gamut of contractual business. Yet often, staff were making fundamental e-mail faux pas – such as deleting messages as soon as they were sent.

By Dr. Monica Seeley and Joanna Goodman

Young’s Brewery was founded in 1831 by Charles Young and Anthony Bainbridge when they purchased the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth, south London. The company has been associated with the Young family ever since, and, until his death in September 2006, the chairman of Young’s was John Young (the great-great-grandson of Charles).

In October 2006, following the merger of Young’s brewing operations with those of Befordshire-based rival Charles Wells, Young’s brewing operations were moved to Charles Wells’ Eagle Brewery in Bedford, while Young’s Wandsworth brewery site was sold for re-development. However, Young’s headquarters remain in Wandsworth. The merger resulted in the creation a new company, under the name Wells & Young’s Brewing Company Limited.

The background

With the growing importance of e-mail and its increasingly widespread application throughout the brewery business, Young’s Brewery, famous for its Young’s and Special Bitters, decided it was time to review its acceptable usage policy (AUP) for internet and e-mail use and to train its staff in e-mail best practice.

According to Young’s Information Services director, Torquil Sligo-Young, compliance was the project’s key driver. He realised that some managers and staff were unaware of the implications of the e-mails that they sent and the need to comply with regulation and adopt best practices in the use of e-mail. Therefore, in late 2005, he initiated an e-mail effectiveness project to inform and educate users throughout the business.

Although e-mail is used for day-to-day operational arrangements, such as taking and making orders and arranging deliveries, every e-mail sent carries an automatic disclaimer stating that no e-mail is contractually binding until it is backed up with a manuscript signature. “Informal discussions indicated that people didn’t realise that the content of their e-mail mattered,” says Sligo-Young. “Some employees were simply deleting all their messages once they had been sent, so business records were being lost. They needed to understand that the e-mails that they had sent were also on the recipient’s system and might also have been forwarded to others, so these messages needed to be retained.”

Prior to the project, Young’s had an e-mail usage policy in place, but this had not been reviewed for nearly four years. During this time, of course, technology had advanced rapidly and e-mail and the internet had become one of the primary methods of communication between the company and the public houses it runs, as well as with employees, suppliers and even customers. Indeed, some Young’s establishments now run local e-marketing campaigns, too.

Therefore another important driver of the e-mail effectiveness project was to prevent the gradual seeping away of efficiency due to e-mail becoming over-used and overly time consuming.

A third driver related to technology. Effective e-mail management requires familiarity with the capability of the software. “We wanted people to learn about managing their e-mail, retaining them and deleting them, how they could file messages in sub-folders and how they could use rules,” says Sligo-Young.

Many people were not getting the most out of the software because they were not familiar with its newer capabilities. To support the use of e-mail enterprise-wide as a key business tool, Young’s appointed Mesmo Consultancy to help it create and implement a straightforward usage policy tailored to the profile and requirements of its business and its employee population. This was supported by user guidance and training that intended to be easy to understand and that could be rolled out across the organisation.

The role of leadership

According to Dr. Monica Seeley, Mesmo’s CEO, the buy-in of senior leadership was critical to the success of Young’s e-mail effectiveness project. At Young’s the project was initiated at director level, which made it easier to cascade the message down the organisation, as well as ensuring that everyone in the business – including top executives – adhered to the usage policy and received the mandatory training. “We ran a separate training event for the board and the top management team at one of their regular monthly meetings,” says Seeley. “It was important to make sure that the programme had their buy-in.”

The next step was to review and update the AUP and present it to the board for its consideration and approval. When the revised policy had been approved, it was then re-issued to all employees. Seeley says that e-mail usage policies often include desired changes in behaviour, which then need to be communicated to employees. “Therefore, it’s not good enough just to have a policy,” she says. “You have to keep it up to date and ensure that people willingly comply with it.

That also requires getting the message across so that it is easily understood and accepted.”

Young’s needed straightforward guidance that would protect its staff as well as the company, but that was short, simple and to the point. This made it a perfect candidate for Seeley’s charter approach. She worked with Young’s in-house IS team to develop an e-mail charter and training materials intended to drive and embed user behaviour that matched the company’s revised AUP. The charter provided Young’s employees with clear operational and behavioural guidelines for effective e-mail usage and management.

Seeley applied her charter approach to Young’s to develop the SPECIAL charter – named, of course, after Young’s Special Bitter – but also an acronym for the e-mail best practices that the company wanted to encourage among staff. The charter was presented to all employees at a series of SPECIAL e-mail best practice workshops at Young’s headquarters in Wandsworth. The workshops were mandatory and were attended by all staff.

“Essentially, it was a training programme to teach people how to use their e-mail,” says Sligo-Young.

“For instance, it used an example of a badly written e-mail containing spelling mistakes to illustrate how important it is to spell-check your e-mail.”

Young’s SPECIAL charter

Young’s SPECIAL charter concentrates on improving people’s communication skills – it is more than just a list of dos and don’ts. “It is often forgotten that e-mail management is not just about mastering the technology,” says Seeley. “It’s equally important to train people to communicate and manage their online time effectively.”

The issues addressed by the SPECIAL charter and the e-mail workshops included:

Poor IT fitness

Many employees didn’t have the confidence or the competence

to use the software effectively. Common difficulties were identified and addressed;

Poor quality communication

Educating people to send clear, well-written, unambiguous messages supports compliance and efficiency, because e-mail can be both mission-critical and contractual. For example, at Young’s late deliveries can have huge implications in terms of operational effectiveness;

Not allowing sufficient time for the recipient to reply

People needed to learn to use e-mail to communicate rather than simply throwing messages at each other. As Seeley says, “People often felt that they needed an immediate answer, or they had to respond to a client straight away, when very often the client simply wanted to know that their communication had been received and was being dealt with.”;

Poor organisation

People needed to manage their time online. This included prioritising their e-mails and deciding which were mission-critical and needed immediate attention and which would benefit from a considered response. “Because e-mail is quick, people tend to reply immediately, but this is not necessarily the best course of action,” explains Seeley. More importantly, they needed to understand that e-mails were business records and had to be retained and filed in an organised way;

Over-reliance on e-mail

E-mail was affecting operations more than people realised. They needed to understand the importance of choosing the most effective communication channel for each situation rather than automatically relying on e-mail for everything.

The outcome

According to Sligo-Young, the training achieved its purpose and was well received by employees. “More than two-thirds of the people attending the workshops felt they had learnt something new,” he says.

“Informal feedback indicates that the majority of staff members feel that they now have a much better understanding of the scope of e-mail, its appropriate uses and its legal obligations. For example, most people now understand the limitations of e-mail contracts. People are also using many more features of the software to save time. Our perception is that the volume of e-mail both sent and received is reducing, but more importantly, people are using the medium much more effectively and precisely than before. Because of this, there is less inappropriate usage of e-mail and much less unwanted e-mail in the system.”

Following the merger and subsequent move of its brewing operations, Young’s is relocating its headquarters from the site of the old Ram Brewery to another location in the borough of Wandsworth but, as Sligo-Young explains, this has not changed the company’s internal communication strategy.

“We still need to be mindful of our e-mail,” he says. “As business critical operations, such as ordering and procurement, are increasingly conducted online, there is a clear business case for clarity. Once the merger is out of the way, it is our intention to follow up the workshops with further training to reiterate what everyone should be doing. Once the IT system has been adjusted to enable the two companies to work together, we also plan to roll out e-mail training to our managed houses. E-mail is an important part of our business.”

Torquil Sligo-Young is information systems director at Young’s Brewery.

Dr. Monica Seeley is chief executive of Mesmo Consultancy and author of ‘Managing In The E-mail Office’ (Butterworth Heinemann, 2003) and ‘Using The PC To Boost Executive Performance’ (Gower Ashgate, 2000). She can be contacted by e-mail: monica@mesmo.co.uk.

Joanna Goodman MBA is a freelance journalist and business writer specialising in corporate communications, knowledge management and information management. She can be contacted by e-mail: joanna.goodman@btinternet.com.

Young’s e-mail best practice charter

S – Select the right communications channel;
P – Put aside time to deal with your in-box;
E – Explain yourself clearly;
C – Check your e-mail is legal;
I – Improve your Microsoft Outlook skills;
A – Attach with care;
L – Leave the recipient time to reply.

“SPECIAL e-mail saves time – yours and mine.”