Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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...
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
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.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
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.
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.
AccountKiller
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.
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.
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!
Email etiquette is dead. Has been for years. Some things I've noticed which contributed to its decline:
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.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I'd hate to argue semantics, but Gmail doesn't cause those threads, people cause those threads. Period.
Sorry, I don't follow. Do people not have the ability to 'select'+'delete' the previous conversation text? I use Outlook for work and Gmail for personal use, and I pretty much always delete the old stuff, unless it's work related and being passed onto others who might be getting into the conversation late (so they can read back and get caught up).
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.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Isn't the problem that they're using email for a task that's better suited to something else - maybe like usenet?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
A: Yes.
Q: Are you sure?
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting annoying in email?
Especially in emails that address a lot of complicated things in one mail, and require a response to each (rather than 'who wants lunch?'), it's *so* much easier to follow the style:
Than the foul Outlook style that goes:
Now, which one of those is easier to understand?
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.
Out of curiosity, what's the problem with just ignoring an email that isn't appropriate to you? In the setting that the submitter describes, there's a business with hundreds of people. If most of those people don't need the email, then something needs to be changed to where it's easy for someone to just submit it to those who need to know. However, if the majority of those people do need to know and you don't, just ignore it.
Along those same lines, I think gmail's filtering of the repeated text is awesome too, but I can't use gmail for my business email needs. Know what I do with the quoted text? Ignore it. Does all the text need to be quoted? Of course not. If you're in an email environment that doesn't thread the messages, it's a lifesaver to be able to grab the context by just looking underneath the reply.
In reality there's a better way for this to happen, but asynchronous communication between a lot of people is very hard. IRC (which my company uses) is so easy that people get off topic very quickly. We say things in IRC that we would never say in an email. IM can include a lot of people, but once you get enough people onto a chat it's the same as IRC.
So, the solution isn't that easy. Sometimes, you don't have the time to type out a full reply, and it's not warranted. If people are replying to everyone with something that they don't need to know, or just plain typing off topic things, then get after them for that. But if the communication is pertinent and the submitter is really just complaining about the format and a few people getting caught in the shotgun blast that weren't meant to be there, then it's a personal problem that he should deal with in private.
It's not 'his' ideal form of etiquette - it used to be quite common and well understood.
99% of my work e-mail is to or from a customer. Top-posting, full-quoting, and non-plaintext are the order of the day. Obviously, we have nothing to gain and everything to lose by yapping at them about it, so we simply follow suit. The extra cost of bandwidth and storage is peanuts compared to the cost of Getting Useful Things Done for them.
I also find it annoying that gMail tries to make everything into a conversation, even if it isn't If I get status emails from some process I'm running, they all look mostly the same, gMail tends to group them all together into one conversation, and tries to figure out what parts are the same, and mark them as from the previous message.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The real idiots are the ones who realise that they've inappropriately done a reply all and then do it again to apologise.
Someone did that at our place last week with a party invitation that was sent to the entire company (150+ people). To make matters worse, the mail had a very large attachment on it, so we all ended up 3 copies of the attachment.
Actually, I hate my phone and only answer it about 10% of the time. Most of the time it is people who want something minor done, but who for some reason don't feel that they should have to go through the helpdesk. What they fail to comprehend is that the reason I hire those helpdesk people is to filter out all of the users' idiotic requests and make sure that only the really important things get to me. I would much prefer a "drinks at XYZ" email, personally.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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.
Liberty.
Technology can be used to solve social problems as well.
No it can't. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.
In this case it's often caused by people using reply all out of habit, and simply not taking the time to consider the implications. If they had a warning dialog when they used it, they might stop to think about it first.
Users don't read. They would hit reply-all, then click through the dialog and bitch about it later.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
preferring a team based arrangement where whoever has the expertise in the topical area is the "boss" of that piece
Sounds like a great arrangement. What do you do when more than one person "has the expertise" in the same area, yet they do not agree on how something is done? Are you then back to an executive style decision?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The automatic exclusion of quoted text when you read a discussion thread where people just include the old messages for references. But still showing vital parts of quoted text if the email uses the quoted text in line and comments on specific parts. Gmail almost always get it right, and all you have to do is press r write what you want to say and send it.
Editing and removing of old reference text is not needed anymore, because gmail has the feature of hiding quoted text to show you what is important. What I'm saying is that when you have a wonderfull feature that just work, you just wont care about what that means to other people.
Could that be because Outlook sucks? I hate participating on internet mailing lists with my company client (but I have to in order to stay current) because it's a lot of work to not topquote with Outlook, not to mention how much slower it is than our old mail system (some IMAP thing we ran Netscape's mail client on).
I read the internet for the articles.
While this has the advantage of being employee-implementable, it is also quite inefficient. It requires a phone call and 2 or more e-mail messages ("Is this correct?", "No, item 4 should be...", "Okay, is this now correct?", "Yes") in order to convey the information that could have been send correctly the first time by the boss requiring only one e-mail. If a boss wants to ruin his employees productivity in order to enforce a specific communication format, I suppose that's his right, but does that make that person a very good leader or communicator? No.