Shared inboxes: Make your team space extra transparent 

It's a beautiful work day for Emma, the designer of Zylker Inc. She opens her inbox, checks through all the emails for the day, picks up an interesting task and starts working on it. At the end of the day, she submits her effort, only to find out that Ken has also worked on the same piece. While Ken and Emma had duplicated work, there were other tasks left undone. Does this happen in your team? Do you also sometimes forget to inform the team before picking up a task?

Transparency is crucial for the productivity of both individual employees and the team as a whole. Even so, keeping your team continuously up to date should be an efficient process and not something that takes too much time or energy. This is just what a shared inbox helps you achieve. A common space for your team where you can receive, reply to, and discuss group emails, where every member knows exactly what others are working on without sharing anything manually—that's what a shared inbox tool offers you. Make every thread public for the team, have no secrets.

A quick look at how our shared inbox tool can enhance your team's transparency  

We have always believed that any team's productivity is directly proportional to how collaborative and transparent its process is. Our team here at Zoho has benefited greatly from task transparency and Zoho TeamInbox has made this process a lot easier for us. Here's what a shared inbox can do to increase your team's transparency:

Stay in the know about your team's projects and priorities

When email chains are accessible to the entire team, every member will be aware of all current tasks and their statuses. You no longer have to keep checking in with your colleagues about work progress—a shared inbox keeps everyone on the same page.

Pro tip: Use the "Assigned to others" view to see updates for the tasks your teammates are working on. You will also know who to contact straight away with respect to a specific work item.

Save time and energy: train newcomers efficiently

When you add a new member to your team, explaining every detail of your projects and processes can be tedious. They might also want to know how tasks were handled before and gain insights from them. A shared, transparent environment makes this easier and more efficient as they can view the history of all the conversations and internal discussions and educate themselves independently.

Pro tip: Assign newcomers a "Guest" role in shared inboxes so they can only view and comment on threads and cannot reply or perform any other activities at first. Change their role and permissions when you think they are ready.  

Keep work going, no matter what

Imagine these two scenarios:

1. an emergency pops up for your teammate, and you don't know when they'll be back to complete that piece of urgent task,
2. a teammate is leaving the team forever.

In cases like these, using a shared inbox means you or your fellow team members can go through the entire conversation and quickly take the task up where they left off.

Pro tip: When you remove a member from a shared inbox, use the option to "Assign their threads to someone else," so the other team member can immediately assume responsibility for those threads.

Delegate automatically

In addition to manual assignments, Zoho TeamInbox lets you set up rules to automatically delegate threads to team members based on email sender, subject, content, and more. Proper delegation prevents both work duplication and losing emails that slipped through the cracks.

Pro tip: Use the "Automatically assign thread upon reply" option while creating an inbox to always assign an unassigned thread to the first person who makes a reply there.

These are a few quick tricks you can adopt to achieve transparency. Try them out with Zoho TeamInbox and let us know what you think. We've been able to roll out new feature enhancements based on the use cases and needs our customers shared with us. We are thankful to our customers for all their feedback and we'd love to hear more.

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