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?"

Comments

Re:Beware of Litigation!

[orclevegam]

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.

Re: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

[phobos13013]

no

{Unclassified}

-----Original Message-----
From: mbravo@spb.ru
Sent: January 22, 2008, 10:39AM
To: Slashdot-all@slashdot.org; phobos13013@corporate-email.com; digg-all@digg.com; bob2074@dobbs.com; bob@aol.com;
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?"

Re:Get gmail

[TheRaven64]

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.

You have to be stern

[Quiet_Desperation]

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 of our recent IT hires. We give them free reign in deciding disciplinary actions.

Re:Spelling and Grammar

[gEvil (beta)]

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:It's also a cause of the problem described

[Mr. Underbridge]

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:It's also a cause of the problem described

[cthulu_mt]

Actually, I hate my phone and only answer it about 10% of the time. Dad? Is that you?