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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?"
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.
A-Bomb
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/
I just wish that my co-workers could learn to spell and use decent grammar. Not would, could.
Love sees no species.
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.
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?
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.
{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?"
...and it should be known by now
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.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
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 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
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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..
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.
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.
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.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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!
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". :)
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.
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
Consider an average prole on (say) $30/hour. If they get 10 of these dumb emails a day, each of 200 lines it will take a few minutes to read each one. Call it about 30 minutes per day or $15. If just one person responds to each of the 100 people on the email, that takes each of those 100 people another 1 minutes to read the new stuff = 100 minutes = $50 per responder, per email.
If 10 people respond to 10 emails a day (all sent to 100 people), that's $5k/day of wasted people time
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
In other words, "Outlook style" is the problem. Outlook QuoteFix is the solution.
Constitutionally Correct
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).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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?
TFA was about internal corporate email, not about personal email.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
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.
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.