Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

mbravo writes "I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"

With gmail

[Bombula (670389)]

How do you deal with this at your place of business

With Gmail. It's intelligent filters screen out the quoted text, and by displaying email as threads (aka conversations) instead of just chronologically it makes dealing with a large volume of correspondence much easier. It's not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than any other email system I've used.

It's also a cause of the problem described

[emj (15659)]

Gmail is what causes those threads with one line responses because it feels much more like chatting than sending emails. People who don't have the feature to remove the quoted text will always complain. Is it a good or bad thing?

Gmail removes somethings that were an annoyance when I used pine/thunderbird, and now I just press "reply all" most of the times, and don't bother cleaning subject or to:/cc: fields. But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.

Ad-Hoc email lists should be easy to set up..

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[LordSnooty (853791)]

Gmail is what causes those threads with one line responses because it feels much more like chatting than sending emails.

Actually I think what causes it is people unwilling to pick up a phone or just go and speak to the person if they're in the same office. As you point out email isn't really for chatting, so when people use it for such it can get messy.

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[oliverthered (187439)]

and what causes that?

well if your like me you can't remember 90% of what was said over the phone, but it's real easy to look it up if someones sent you an email.

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[smurfsurf (892933)]

So why don't you note these instructions down? If he speaks too fast, ask him to slow down, as you are writing it down so you don't miss a step. He will understand and appreciate it. It is your responsibility to get it right. If you can't remember everything and don't take notes, you rightfully get negative feedback about it. He is your boss, it is his choice of communication medium, you have to deal with it in the best way you can.

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[7-Vodka (195504)]

This is easy, write down what you think he said over the phone then send him an email which says: Is this what you want me to do?
Just keep the meeting minutes yourself and get him to sign off on them.

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[paeanblack (191171)]

Actually I think what causes it is people unwilling to pick up a phone or just go and speak to the person if they're in the same office. As you point out email isn't really for chatting, so when people use it for such it can get messy.

Phones and instant messaging interrupt the recipient. Sending out a "Drinks at XYZ tonight?" email to five coworkers is not worth disrupting five people with phone calls who could otherwise check their email on their own schedules.

Using a phone when it is not necessary is even worse in many cases.

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[cthulu_mt (1124113)]

Actually, I hate my phone and only answer it about 10% of the time.

Dad? Is that you?

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[toleraen (831634)]

Because they sign your paychecks?

Re:It's also a cause of the problem described

[Mr. Underbridge (666784)]

Gmail removes somethings that were an annoyance when I used pine/thunderbird, and now I just press "reply all" most of the times, and don't bother cleaning subject or to:/cc: fields.

On behalf of your poor coworkers...stop doing that. I can't stand the morons in my company that can't distinguish between the reply and reply all buttons. Second to that in annoyance is the people who indiscriminately send company wide emails.

Seriously. With about half a second of actual thought you can actually avoid clogging everyone else's inbox with crap.

But the "reply all" feature should reply to everyone in the discussion, not just to the ones that were included in the last email.

Actually, whoever came up with the reply all button should be tried for war crimes at the Hague.

Re:

[gnick (1211984)]

That would be nice, but is prohibitive for many companies. My company, for example, does not allow e-mail outside the firewall unencrypted. On this side, we have Lotus Notes which approaches zero usability as e-mail etiquette drops. We have periodic training for users mostly scheduled by how ugly things have gotten. Some employees, of course, never learn when it is or is not appropriate to use the "Reply to All" button, but there's no action taken on the corporate scale. The only way to handle it is to

Re:With gmail

[edmicman (830206)]

So where's the "Gmail" style conversations in standard desktop clients? I use Thunderbird at work, alongside some users with Outlook. I've got threading turned on for Thunderbird but compared to Gmail's implementation it, in a word, sucks.

Re:

[value_added (719364)]

With Gmail ... and by displaying email as threads (aka conversations) instead of just chronologically it makes dealing with a large volume of correspondence much easier.

That's a feature that most of have always taken for granted. Long-time Windows users, on the other hand, will no doubt consider such a feature as novel, given that historically, Outlook and Outlook express were incapable of such an ordinary function, and their users had probably never seen a threaded message list of email or newsgroup posti

My experience

[soulsteal (104635)]

My experience in the defense industry has shown me that long, full-quote e-mails are often useful for defending yourself against another's incompetence.

Re:My experience

[orclevegam (940336)]

My experience in the defense industry has shown me that long, full-quote e-mails are often useful for defending yourself against another's incompetence.

That unfortunately is the reason most quoted for using e-mail in the first place. Most upper management (and middle management) view e-mail not as a communication tool, but as a way to CYA. The phrase "Send it to me in an e-mail." is uttered far to often not because they need reminding or somehow didn't hear you just tell them that, but because they want it in writing.

Re:My experience

[Anomolous Cowturd (190524)]

I tell my boss to send me specs/todos and so on in email because that's where I keep track of them, and cross em off as they're done. Otherwise it's in one ear and out the other. Not always about CYA.

Re:My experience

[The Fun Guy (21791)]

One guy I know is famous for issuing instructions to his staff that range from irritating to ridiculous to borderline actionable. These are done on the phone, because 1) the guy will never put anything like that in writing, and 2) he can draw you in and escalate your time and energy commitment since there's no clear record of what you agreed to do on the project.

I took to following up his phone calls with a summary e.mail, outlining his demands on my time and effort. He got mad and told me to knock it off, that there was no need for e.mails when a phone call was sufficient, etc. I persisted, prefacing it with, "Just so I have it clear what you want me to do." He stopped the vampire routine, at least with me.

Re:My experience

[sholden (12227)]

And how is that a bad thing?

Planning, etc is much better done by talking or even by IM, but people manage to come away with different impressions on what was agreed on, so a written note removes that ambiguity. Which seems a good thing.

I like to get things in writing (either an email, or a bug tracking/project tracking database entry) when I'm tasked with something. Both for the lack of ambiguity and for the self interested reasons of it providing a record of why I'm behind on other things (you had me do this first) and for CYA (record X was deleted because you said to do so in Y).

Email makes that such records very easy. I've worked with someone who would tell you to do X, and then a week later disavow all knowledge of ever having done so when it turns out X wasn't actually such a great idea - a cheap, fast written record is a wonderful thing.

Re:

[kent_eh (543303)]

I work in an increasingly large and beaurocratic telco.
CYA is the biggest reason around here for using e-mail (and keeping a multi year archive of both my inbox and outbox).

"Gee Mr. manager, the batteries finally failed due to overheating... Yup, here's my e-mail from last year telling you we needed to upgrade the cooling. And here's my e-mail from 3 years ago saying the same thing (with your reply saying you'll deal with it later)."

The problem

[pubjames (468013)]

I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here.

Perhaps there is no problem... Or maybe you are the problem...

Beware of Litigation!

[darkmeridian (119044)]

I encourage everyone to be wary when writing e-mails. If your firm ever gets sued, all that becomes discoverable, and attorneys have to read through all your e-mails and documents to look for interesting things. Avoid long threads and stick with short, clear e-mails. Lots of one-liners leads to situations where a vague line looks incriminating when taken out of context.

Re:

[Vicarius (1093097)]

I would rather have a long chain of evidence that protects me personally, so when the shit hits the fan and ligitation starts, I have something to prove that it did not happen due to my incompetence.

Re:Beware of Litigation!

[orclevegam (940336)]

I would rather have a long chain of evidence that protects me personally, so when the shit hits the fan and ligitation starts, I have something to prove that it did not happen due to my incompetence.

I avoid e-mail whenever possible, so that when the shit hits the fan they can't even prove I was in the office.

It's Free.....

[Finallyjoined!!! (1158431)]

Because the perception that email is "free" nobody in management really cares. The only thing they worry about is inappropriate stuff.

Yes, they need educating.

Different tool

[orclevegam (940336)]

Sounds like what you really need is a company IM server. Install a Jabber server and client for the company LAN and you'll probably have a lot less 1 line e-mails as it's just easier to handle that sort of thing over e-mail. They're using e-mail as something it isn't designed for because they don't have anything better. If that doesn't fix it, I guess you could always LART a few key personnel. Maybe you could put a filter on the e-mail server that rejects any message less than 100 characters (non-quoted) and just tell everyone it's a new spam filter.

Re:Different tool

[hansamurai (907719)]

That's a really good idea.

This text added to reach the 100 character minimum so that it isn't marked as spam.

Re:Different tool

[sobachatina (635055)]

Exactly, people are using email because that is all they have.

I work in a fairly large group and we have several methods of communication:

IM- for talking to one person right now.
Email- for messages- Or conversations of a very temporary nature- like "where should we go for lunch"
PHPBB- for almost all question/answer type communication. This is extremely helpful because the experienced architects and build team can give advice or answer questions just once.
Wiki- For internal documentation and build instructions.

Since we setup the wiki and BB our email traffic has been drastically reduced. The only emails to the entire group that I see anymore are to welcome new people and announce donuts.

Re:Different tool

[samkass (174571)]

Note that if you're a publicly traded company, SarbOx requires that your IM server keep logs of all employee correspondence for a certain amount of time. There are several Jabber/XMPP servers that can be configured to conform to SarbOx, but I'm not aware of any which do with a default install. You really don't want to be the one sent to jail when you can't produce the requested IM records during the court proceedings.

What's the problem?

[rob1980 (941751)]

I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here.

Well, what is the problem? Do you just not like long e-mail threads, or is there a legitimate concern here?

Convincing them there's a legitimate problem, aside from your ideal form of etiquette, ought to be step one. Otherwise - why would random_employee_002 do anything different?

Re:

[Hognoxious (631665)]

Isn't the problem that they're using email for a task that's better suited to something else - maybe like usenet?

Re:What's the problem?

[DerekLyons (302214)]

Convincing them there's a legitimate problem, aside from your ideal form of etiquette, ought to be step one. Otherwise - why would random_employee_002 do anything different?

It's not 'his' ideal form of etiquette - it used to be quite common and well understood.

Forum

[xtracto (837672)]

Just configure an *inernal* phpBB (and secure it FTLOG!!) forum and make people post there. If you have long conversation threads then it might be good to have them in a forum instead of clogging the mail (and that way you can prevent mail leaks.

And your point is?

[phaze3000 (204500)]

Email is a tool. The job of IT is to support that tool and help people use that tool effectively. If you think employees are using IT non-optimally because of lack of training, arrange training. If employees of the company think these one line emails are the best use of the technology even after you've trained them effectively, let them get on with it.

If your problem is that your mail server can't handle all these mails, it's time to upgrade the mail server and/or switch to different software.

Part of the problem

[Aram Fingal (576822)]

Part of the problem is that there are two distinct ways people commonly do quotations in email. The quick and lazy way is to just hit reply, quoting the sender's entire message below, and write your reply above. The more precise way is to quote specific lines from the original message and write your reply below each set of lines. What I really hate is when the two methods get mixed. For example, I use the more precise method to reply to a message and the someone else quotes the whole thing with their reply above, the message goes through another round or two of replies and then gets forwarded on to someone else who was not one of the original recipients. Good luck figuring out the track of the conversation.

Re:

[value_added (719364)]

The quick and lazy way is to just hit reply, quoting the sender's entire message below, and write your reply above. The more precise way is to quote specific lines from the original message and write your reply below each set of lines.

I'd suggest the second should be characterised as "written, edited and formatted for the benefit of the recipient rather than the convenience of the sender". A fairly popular signature that reflects one aspect of the obviousness of this is the following:

A: Yes.
Q: Are you sure

Re:

[Lumpy (12016)]

That is not the problem. In fact long chains of "reply to" are awesome.

I hate the new chick in Sales or the Director of marketing that has a 1.2meg photo background, a 3.4meg digital signature image, and uses wierd fonts on all their emails.

HTML email is the most evil and worst thing ever created in the world, and outlook gladly let's you abuse the damn feature.

I dont like my email box clogged to the hilt because you want a foofy image and pretty font. Oh and marketing sending everyone a Copy of a 130meg

Part of the solution

[ChristTrekker (91442)]

In other words, "Outlook style" is the problem. Outlook QuoteFix [in.tum.de] is the solution.

Re: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

[phobos13013 (813040)]

no

{Unclassified}

-----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail]
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail];
Subject: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

"I work in a largish company, heavily into IT, and in a complex and quickly changing market. Employees are predominantly in the 30 or younger age-bracket, and as you might expect we rely on a lot of internal e-mail. Despite that, lately I'm finding myself increasingly frustrated by a complete lack of e-mail etiquette in the company. A typical thread might look like a hundred-message-long chain of one-line replies, with full quoting and hundreds of recipients in the 'To:' field. It feels like it is happening more and more often. I don't seem to be seeing much success in explaining to my co-workers what the problem is here. How do you deal with this at your place of business, and does your company care? Does the company take any policing or educating measures?"

Stop using email for all electronic communications

[Vellmont (569020)]

It sounds like you're using email when you should be using another, or several different technologies.

Look into putting up an IM server, a wiki, blogs, online discussion groups, etc. Email is poorly suited to the kind of long-running threads you're talking about. One size does NOT fit all.

You have to be stern

[Quiet_Desperation (858215)]

How do you deal with this at your place of business

Beatings and electrocutions. It may work differently outside the gulag, but I wouldn't know.

We're experimenting with other methods. Here's a picture [theseventhvoyage.com] of our recent IT hires. We give them free reign in deciding disciplinary actions.

E-mail Conversations

[rumblin'rabbit (711865)]

My problem is e-mail conversations, with 20 e-mails going back and forth. Cause I'm a manager, people think they have to include me in on the conversation so I can "stay in the loop".

People, have your conversation, come to some conclusions, and e-mail me a brief summary.

Disable "Reply to All"

[redelm (54142)]

... that's all it takes [plus limited access to distro lists]. Yes, it's is a PITA for some cases, but to curb abule, the innocent usually suffer.

Trimming the top-posting is slightly less important-- people just delete the previous messages to have a nice archive. That is, if someone didn't trim early!

Dead

[Mr_Silver (213637)]

Email etiquette is dead. Has been for years. Some things I've noticed which contributed to its decline:

• People putting everyone in the "To" line which means that Outlook highlights that email in a different colour (according to my setup) because it's assumed that I'm being asked for something.
• Putting two John's in the "to:" line and then addressing the email to "John". Which one?
• Microsoft Outlook which positively encourages people to top quote.
• People using the excuse that being on a Blackberry means that they can not use any punctuation or capitalisation.
• Inserting large graphical images as the signature. I saw one of an animated Betty Boop. WTF?
• Using the stationary functionality to give me a mock background image of a paper pad. Why?
• Use of Comic Sans as a font.
• Sending out messages with high priority set on a far too regular basis. High priority is for just that, if you use it all the time then it loses its meaning.

There is probably more but I can't think of them right now. The main problem is that no-one is taught any etiquette and (as they've never used UNIX or posted in news forums) they haven't had any kind of etiquette forced on them by an application or verbally beaten into them by some irate news group member.

A solution

[Confused (34234)]

First, forget about changing the people, it's futile to try. You need to find a solution that works for you under the current situation.

Second, never ever put something in writing what you wouldn't want to have to explain at court. There's no reason for it. Be offensive as you like face to face, in meeting or on the phone, but always the voice of reason in mails or chat. Never take part of bad-mouthing people in written, you simply don't know who will read it.

About mails where you're on the CC: list: ignore anything where you're only on CC. If the sender would have intended it for you, he'd put you on the To: list.

For mails where you're on the To: list, the question is if you're the only one. If there are other people on it and things need to be done based on it, assume someone else from the To: list will do the work and ignore it. If it the sender intended something specially for you, he'd should have sent you the mail addressed only to you.

Mail containing meeting minutes of meetings you didn't attend, ignore them. I something relevant to you was discussed there, you'd either have been invited or someone would have had the task to inform you about it. Wading through other peoples meeting minutes isn't productive.

All this sounds harsh and should only apply to mails you don't care about, but in reality works quite well. For the CC: I always liked to blame it on my clever spam filter that failed to highlight it as non-spam because I'm not a recipient. People get very miffed about that but somehow seem to slow to come up with good arguments against it. For the other mails you ignored, it's best to ramp that up slowly starting by the most stupid ones. The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them.

If some mail asks for work to be done and you're on the To: list and you don't feel safe enough to ignore it completely, in big organisations a good way to cover your arse is to ask the original sender for a meeting of all people on the To: list to schedule resource allocations. If you are creative, add to that mail a few additional people, best some with opposing agendas. That usually puts off tasks for long enough for them to become irrelevant.

About the endless quotes and attachments, what works best is never to quote the whole thing. Always remove all quotes except a very few you are replying to. That has the advantage, that people see only what you want them to see. Most people won't find the original message in their inbox anyway. It's also a good idea to cut down on the recipient list (just leave enough to cover your backside). That divides te recipient crowd into groups with different information, which always can be useful, in case people start to blame you. Then you can fob it off to someone else you informed but who didn't act on it.

Also avoid short mails, except if they're very positive to you. Present the case with advantages and caveats. Instead of quotes, start your mail with a short - and naturally also biased in your favour - summary of the matter at hand. That forces people to read and think your mail, instead of scanning just for know thread patterns. Most likely, this will exceed most people's attention span. The additional advantage of restating all the important aspects of matter is, that people will sometimes go into discussions about that or will feel uncomfortable to disagree. I always liked to bring up matters like involving the legal department, safety and health regulations, compliances of any kind, or of everything else fails the involvement of the quality control department for affairs I wanted to get rid off. You'd be surprised how few people dare to put in writing, that they don't want to make sure those things are done properly.

This should give you in the middle term some lee-way to ignore mails as you see fit, and people will get very cautious of asking for your help. And, as a side benefits, you sometimes are able to collect mails that are always very popular if your company happens to be investigated for some misdeeds.

Cheers.

Re:Get gmail

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Yes, sending confidential commercial information via a third party is an excellent recommendation and one I fully endorse. I also suggest you use MSN Messenger for shorter conversations.

Re:Get gmail

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

For corporate email, the route ought to be an SSL connection (with an out-of-band distributed certificate) to your internal mail server, then on to the mail delivery agent running on the same machine (or forwarded over SSL to another internal machine), then to the user's computer via HTTPS webmail or POP3/IMAP over SSL. If it goes on to any computers that your IT department don't control then you are doing something wrong.

TFA was about internal corporate email, not about personal email.

Re:Spelling and Grammar

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

I just wish that my co-workers could learn to spell and use decent grammar.

Yeah, taht's my biggest complaint. They should of learned grammer in school.

Re:

[wizardforce (1005805)]

this has nothing to do with email consuming disk space, this is about the fact that a lot of people who use email at the work place don't bother to clean up their emails. they already have a copy of everything said beforehand, so they don't need to clutter the next one with the entirety of what has already been said. Their spelling and/or grammar should be expected to be readable by another human being. Private emails are casual, work emails OTOH should be more professional.

Re:i don't get it

[sydbarrett74 (74307)]

It has nothing to do with drive space or CPU cycles. It has everything to do with the fact that people receive dozens or hundreds of emails a day which are irrelevant and waste their time. Too many lazy people hit Reply All when the only person who cares is the original sender. The worst is when, say, a person emails with: 'Will the person with the green Hyundai please come to my office?' and my inbox gets flooded with dozens of messages all expressing variants of: 'Nope! I don't drive a Hyundai!' A lot of it is common sense, which isn't that common.

Re:i don't get it .... it's wasting people's time

[petes_PoV (912422)]

It's not a technical problem, it's a people problem.

Consider an average prole on (say) $30/hour. If they get 10 of these dumb emails a day, each of 200 lines it will take a few minutes to read each one. Call it about 30 minutes per day or $15. If just one person responds to each of the 100 people on the email, that takes each of those 100 people another 1 minutes to read the new stuff = 100 minutes = $50 per responder, per email.

If 10 people respond to 10 emails a day (all sent to 100 people), that's $5k/