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

My experience

[soulsteal]

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

[Anomolous Cowturd]

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

[sholden]

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.

The problem

[pubjames]

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]

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.

Different tool

[orclevegam]

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

[sobachatina]

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.

And your point is?

[phaze3000]

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.

Re:With gmail

[edmicman]

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.

Dead

[Mr_Silver]

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.

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

[oliverthered]

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

[paeanblack]

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.