Pros and cons of disabling automatic email notifications

Disabling email notifications is an option we provide administrators for their organization, if they'd prefer the flexibility of picking and choosing which emails are sent in relation Small Improvements activity.

To locate the email setup portion of your account, log-in and visit the Administration tab, then select the Emails button to view the entire list.

Below is a guide to the best practices for email notifications in Small Improvements.

Pros

If your team would like to avoid automatic email notifications and prefer to have face to face conversation, then disabling specific automated emails is a route you can take to improve that communication. The benefit being a conversation can take precedence over an automated email that may seem like it's taking away this conversation option.

Additionally, some team members may feel that they would not like to receive certain notifications, or members of your management team might not wish to receive notifications at all- Since they will likely get quite a few depending on the size of their team.

As an example: If you'd like to disable the automatic notification that a reviewer has declined to leave another employee feedback in a 360 cycle, you can disable this option from the setup screen. In this case, you may prefer that the employee speaks to their colleague in person to explain why they're declining the nomination instead of receiving an automated email.

Cons

The biggest drawback of disabling specific email notifications is the possibility that down the line you'll expect an email notification to go out- but it doesn't because the template has been disabled by an administrator in the email setup. This is especially confusing and/or frustrating if the primary Admin has changed at some point.

Also important to consider: Disabling email notifications affect all members of your team. For example if you disable the email notification sent to managers to approve reviewers, this will be no longer sent to any managers of employees participating in a 360 review.

At this time, it is not possible to have a list of employees excluded when deactivating a notification.

Best Practices

We recommend only disabling email notifications when you've made decision to follow an alternative workflow, not in the case of employees not wishing to receive emails.

Evaluate first: disabling a notification before it's ever been sent is not the best way to gauge interest in receiving that email. We'd recommend trying out a cycle or two with the automatic notifications and only disable after evaluating your team's experience in the cycle. You can disable, and also re-enable an email at any time.
Allow staff to use two emails: In the case where an employee no longer wishes to receive an email notification, he/she could use a different email in Small Improvements for communication purposes. We offer a login email and also communication email option in the account setup for employees. To enable this option for your account, please reach out to our support team.
Inform your team: Can't stress this enough- Make sure the rest of your HR staff is aware that an automatic email has been disabled, so that they do not worry when the email is not going out to employees when they are running a new cycle. The full list of email notifications and their status are listed in the email setup screen for all HR Admins.
Nudge emails: nudge emails are not automatic, disabling the nudges is likely something that would not provide a lot of value as they won't be sent to employees automatically and your team may want to use these to email users individually in the middle of the cycle.
Using integrations: if you're disabling an email template, consider using our Slack integration to allow communication on your company chat instead of via email.

The Daily Digest Email

The daily digest email does not have to be disabled for all employees in order to stop the email going to a single employee. We do provide an option in the email setup screen to disable the email entirely... But instead we'd recommend that individual employees disable the notification on their individual profiles.

We have a guide to disabling the notification for employees, here.

Emails that cannot be disabled

There are several emails that cannot be disabled in the system, as they pertain to setting up accounts or resetting password/account information. Below is the list of the emails that cannot be disabled.

Access to Small Improvements: Forgotten password & reset password
Access to Small Improvements: Manually invited
Access to Small improvements: Manually invited [for guest-users only]
Access to Small Improvements: Password change instructions
Access to Small Improvements: Welcome mail, and password resetting instructions
Email Verification: Google Apps Service Account