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]

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.

What's the problem?

[rob1980]

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?

E-mail vs. chat...

[TofuMatt]

It depends... the people in the office who only use e-mail to communicate are often the ones I get one-line e-mails with bad grammar and no signatures, etc., from. However, a lot of us use an office-wide Jabber system now, so I increasingly get brief messages or requests over iChat. Unless I'm just really quickly rattling off an e-mail from my iPod or something, I make sure to treat an e-mail much more formally than I suspect many others do. Working in government, it's considered an official gov't document/record, so I tend to treat it more officially than a quick chat message.

different modes of collaboration

[v_1_r_u_5]

try a wiki, a forum, a social-networking solution akin to facebook, IMs or other online chats, extranets, online live documents (like writely/google docs), whatever. email is an outdated medium. try "collaborative software" in ask.com

It's also a cause of the problem described

[emj]

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:With gmail

[orclevegam]

Sometimes I wish the reply all button had a molly-guard [catb.org] on it. Or at least add a dialog box on it that says something like "Using this constitutes spamming, does your message really need to be spammed to everyone in the From and CC field of this e-mail?".

Re:My experience

[The Fun Guy]

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:i don't get it

[wizardforce]

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.

Agree with the problem

[deep_creek]

An email sent to say 20 folks in the morning... half hit "reply" and the other half hit "reply all". By the afternoon my inbox is filled with all types of conversation, etc... on the topic. I then spend/waste my time trying to get everyone back on the same "page". More time is wasted following emails all over the place than actually working on the topic the email originally addressed. Everyone I've spoken to agrees with the frustrations and wasted time, but nothing is done to correct it because one or two big-wigs think that that is the best way for them to be kept informed of what is going on. (?) My only solution thus far is to call actual person-to-person meetings, make actual office visits, etc... This is increasingly becoming more efficient as To/CC box address lists become even larger. Maybe I should just send all my emails as "global". :)

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

[LordSnooty]

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.

Dead

[MBCook]

In my experience, it's dead. My office has a bit of an informal tone, but I get emails from external businesses we deal with that have spelling mistakes, IM speak ("... if UR able 2..."), and other things.

We've received emails that are clearly accusatory that we've failed at something, or something is our fault. We've had people fly off the handle when we reply that that's not the case with evidence attached (my favorite: when it's a quote from one of their earlier emails).

Things just still surprise me. Yesterday I got an email from one of the highest ranking people in our sales/marketing department. It was all very business and sort of what I'd expect, until the second to last line which was... "kthxbye".

People (both internal and external) are often far less proper and "businessey" (I hate to use that fake word, but I don't know what else to use) than I would expect. The etiquette is gone (not that it was probably ever there).

A solution

[Confused]

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:A solution

[bitrunner]

> "The more mails you ignore, the less people expect you to read them."

I actually agree on that one. I used to get A LOT of e-mail, and I mean A LOT (sorry shift key only works one level up).

Anyway I decided to tell people I only read my e-mail when:
- After I entered my office at start of the day
- before lunch
- after lunch
- an hour before I leave

At first it comes across as annoying/irritating, but hey.. come on.. it is e-mail.

The resulting effect: I get A LOT LESS e-mail. People know that the chances of me finding and reading that one important e-mail amongst their 30 e-crap msgs is unlikely. Of course I accidentally deleted 'important' e-mail because it was stuck inbetween 30 not so important ones.
Also.. I am knowing to doze off, loose track/interest in e-mail that is WAY TOO LONG or enhanced with html, pictures sound etc.

When asked why I behave that way I answer: Receiving e-mail at this rate is like someone knocking on my door every 30 seconds (or even more frequent) that is annoying. I have a job to do and it isn't reading all that e-mail. Therefor I switched it off and check it bearly more often than snail mail.

It works really well for me now, it is known that if e-mail is sent to me.. it better be worth my time.

Softros LAN Messenger

[jameseyjamesey]

We had this problem at work until we got people to use Softros Lan Manager. We pushed it to all the clients, and amazingly they stopped using e-mail for 1 line replies and quick conversations.