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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/
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?
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.
{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
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.
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.
This guy's the limit!
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.
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.