Professional communications standards
Enhancing staff and student wellbeing through communication standards.
With technology allowing us to be constantly connected, it's important to remember the value of disconnecting and balancing study, work and personal life. This also applies to our teaching staff, who work so hard to deliver high-quality education at Griffith.
To help you understand what you can reasonably expect from staff and to enhance everyone's wellbeing, we have developed some professional communication standards. We encourage you to keep these standards in mind when communicating with your teaching teams, and be considerate of their personal time outside of work hours. Adopting these habits now can help you establish healthy professional boundaries as you enter the workforce including by ensuring you plan your work in advance.
Communication standards
To maintain a healthy balance for everyone, we ask all students to follow these standards when communicating with your teaching teams:
- Only use official University channels, i.e., Griffith email when communicating with staff. This will allow you to receive out-of-office messages when staff are away and means you can be confident your message has been received.
- Choose the communication method requested by your tutor or, if they have not expressed a preference, use the best method for your situation. Please don’t send the same message via multiple channels.
- Always include your full name, student ID number, course name and class details (day and time) in your message.
- As a general rule, try to send your messages between Monday and Friday, 9am to 5pm (although if you have a weekend or evening class, it might be appropriate to communicate around the time of the class). If you send a message outside this time, you should not assume it will be seen until ordinary working hours.
- You can typically expect a response to your message within 48 hours during working days of the trimester (Monday to Friday), but you may need to wait longer if this period includes the weekend or if the staff member is a part-time worker.
- Please wait until the 48-hour response period has lapsed before sending a follow-up communication.
- Use a professional and courteous tone in your communications. This is both respectful of our staff and helps you develop good habits for the workforce. Consider using tools such as delay or schedule functions in Outlook so you can deliver your emails at the time of your choosing.
In summary, only send communications to your teaching team during work hours and only send reminders if you have not heard back within two working days. Be professional and polite in all your communications.