email

[jane10]

My boss is out of the office a lot but has access to email from his home.  I can also access his mailbox from the office.

I need to find a way to handle more of the emails he receives myself as this currently takes up a lot of his evenings and I'm sure he doesn't need to see all of them.  I find it difficult though judging which ones he should see or be aware of.

Has anyone else had similar experiences?  Has anybody got any hints as to how I can tackle this problem?  I'd really like to do something pro-active for him rather than be asked.

Many thanks

[chris68]

Jane10, how did you get your boss to approve access to his email?  I would like to approach my bossie about this for the same reasons you listed.  Hes out travelling the rest of this week, and I have no idea what emails he's received.  So, if something is urgent it waits til he comes back to the office on Monday.

Chris68
Peer Moderator

[jane10]

Hi Chris68, thanks for your reply.  I find that having access to his emails actually saves time as I'm automatically aware of forthcoming meetings that he may not have talked to me about etc.  Also it's just generally useful to keep in tune with what's going on in the company and what's important to him.  As he's not in very often it's a great way of us communicating what's happening in the company when we don't have the chance to talk face to face.

This was a system that I was lucky enough to inherit with my job but feel that I could be doing more, the problem is making a judgement call on what I think I should deal with.

[lioness]

The best thing to do is ask him what e-mails he thinks he needs to handle himself and what he thinks should be turned over to you for handling. My boss travels extensively and I have complete access and control over his e-mail and calendar. Everyone knows that whatever they send him will be seen, and perhaps handled, by me. It saves everyone a lot of time because people don't have to call wondering why he hasn't responded to them. There are some e-mails he never sees because he doesn't need to. If I can take care of it, I do. Talk to him; he'll appreciate the initiative.

Lioness, Queen of the Jungle

[chris68]

jane10, I udnerstand.  I have the same problems while bossie is either travelling on vacation or for company business, which he does do quite frequently (travel for business that is).  For example, right now he is in Washington, DC on company business and he just checked in for voice mail and I missed his call.  So left him another voicemail message with my request and now I sit and wait for his response.  He doesn't have a laptop with him so checking email is out of the question for him while he's travelling.  Normally he doesn't take a laptop so the idea of checking his emails would be a big timesaver on his part.

Anything administrative I would say go ahead and try to accomplish if you can.  However, any of the other items, you can run by him via cell phone and let him know what's going on, or if its an emergency someone in his department that can handle the situation best can probably look at it and make a judgement call or handle it while he's out.  There are a couple of managers here that are very capable of handling most items while bossie is away on two fronts for us.  So between the two I rely on them while bossie is on travel status. If I feel it is of dire emportance, I will call and leave him a message on his cell phone with either details or with a message for him to call me regarding such and such. IT's worked out wonderful so far and I would probably handle his emails much the same fashion.

We've received phone calls of awards that we have and all the bosses and managers were out on travel status, I've had him paged at airports before while in transit and that worked out really well.  Thank heavens for our Travel Agency cause they know us so well and know that its an emergency when we ask them to page for us.

Hope that has helped some, I'm sure someone will be by with more information on what they do.

Chris68
Peer Moderator

[jane10]

Thanks very much, sounds like you're a real asset.  I'll certainly talk to him on this.

[JessW]

Jane10

I have full owner access to 4 of my bosses outlook accounts (used to be more but have deliberately cut myself out of some as they never get any mail anyway - all their mail is sent to me direct) which enables me to respond on their behalf (borth with and without their foreknowledge).  I can do this because they know that I would not give advice on something I had no knowledge of and that saves them time and effort and some of our clients / contacts know that it willget done and to their satisfaction.

It also means that I have to keep up with what is 'company policy' and changes in the law on various matters (I work in an internal legal section) and when and where necessary get somebody else to answer the question.  This is of course on an international scale and can cause twice as much headaches / migraines than if you just reader rights to the email and 'briefed' your boss once a day for, say, five minutes together with anything else that might have happened that day, the previous or next.

One main reason why I was given rights is that I have always done it since starting at the Group approx 6 years ago and have a reputation for confidentiality without being told it is confidential.  If your boss trusts you even half as much I am sure he would probably be glad of somebody taking the mundane away from him as well as making sure the extremely urgent ones get answered promptly, even if it is to say that Bossie won't be able to get back to him/her/them before such a time/date.

You shoudl talk to your Bossie about this and setting agreeable ground rules for your access in the interest of time saving, speeding up responses and the like while maintaining confidentiality - you wouldn't really want to read about  customer complaints about you prior to being told (example) when you couldn't defend yourself without digging a bigger ditch, would you?

Jess

[hgray]

I've always had complete access to bossie's email (inbox/calendar/files etc.) - we went through the general "dross" of what he doesn't need to see/what I can delete and it saves a huge amount of time.  He doesn't tend to take his laptop away with him now as he knows I can check everything and if anything comes in that's urgent I can always contact him.

Definitely think you should sit down and talk through what you could deal with in his absence.

Helen

[countrigal]

A good way of determining what you and he feel comfortable with you handling would be to schedule some time face-to-face with him and have samples of e-mails with you.  Using, say a week's worth of e-mails printed out as examples, go through and make notes of what you'd do to handle those you think you should/could and the ones you wouldn't handle note as such.  Then during your meeting, go through these.  Let him give you input and suggestions.  There might be some where he will tell you not to handle them, even though you did what he would do, and others that you didn't touch he might ask you to, but at least you'll have some feed-back and he can see what an assett this would be to him.  Of course, one week's worth of e-mails won't be all inclusive of the types of e-mail he receives over time, but it is a starting point.  

In my current position, I do not have this need.  But in my last position, I was continuously reading bossie's e-mails and forwarding those needing handling to the appropriate person and making notes for Bossie so he'd know if his boss asked about it.  This freed up a lot of his time, both in and out of the office, and kept me more in touch with the details of the company.

CountriGal
Peer Moderator

[jane10]

Many thanks to everyone for your helpful replies.

My boss goes on holiday end of next week for the whole of August so before then I see it as a good opportunity to sit down with him to go over, maybe a week's worth of emails to see what trends emerge.

This has been my first posting but it's really nice to know that such support is out there!  Thanks again

[deedee]

I have access to Bossie's inbox and while she is away, I sort through the dreck and as a further step, I have set up a number of folders to sort the emails into (read, action required, urgent, etc.) and some for emails pertaining to specific projects.  This makes it easier for Bossie to quickly check the most important items first and hold the others for reading later, plus I can ditch the useless spam she sometimes gets.  I would discuss this with your boss, and add the folder advice--just click the item and drag it to the proper folder.  You could decide ahead of time what titles or purposes to assign to the folders.  Good luck!  This was a great item by the way; with summer vacations upon us, I'm sure many others have this question.

[jane10]

Many thanks deedee, that's really useful.

Hopefully I'll manage to meet with my boss this week before he goes away and what with a combination of printing off a week's emails to spot trends, creating folders for particular topics etc. i've got lots to discuss!

Thanks again and as you say I'm sure this'll affect many more of us during the summer!