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