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

[orclevegam]

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. That unfortunately is the reason most quoted for using e-mail in the first place. Most upper management (and middle management) view e-mail not as a communication tool, but as a way to CYA. The phrase "Send it to me in an e-mail." is uttered far to often not because they need reminding or somehow didn't hear you just tell them that, but because they want it in writing.

Re:My experience

[The Fun Guy]

One guy I know is famous for issuing instructions to his staff that range from irritating to ridiculous to borderline actionable. These are done on the phone, because 1) the guy will never put anything like that in writing, and 2) he can draw you in and escalate your time and energy commitment since there's no clear record of what you agreed to do on the project.

I took to following up his phone calls with a summary e.mail, outlining his demands on my time and effort. He got mad and told me to knock it off, that there was no need for e.mails when a phone call was sufficient, etc. I persisted, prefacing it with, "Just so I have it clear what you want me to do." He stopped the vampire routine, at least with me.

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.

Re:Beware of Litigation!

[orclevegam]

I would rather have a long chain of evidence that protects me personally, so when the shit hits the fan and ligitation starts, I have something to prove that it did not happen due to my incompetence. I avoid e-mail whenever possible, so that when the shit hits the fan they can't even prove I was in the office.

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.

Re:Different tool

[samkass]

Note that if you're a publicly traded company, SarbOx requires that your IM server keep logs of all employee correspondence for a certain amount of time. There are several Jabber/XMPP servers that can be configured to conform to SarbOx, but I'm not aware of any which do with a default install. You really don't want to be the one sent to jail when you can't produce the requested IM records during the court proceedings.

What's the problem?

[rob1980]

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?

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: Corporate Email Etiquette - Dead or Alive?

[phobos13013]

no

{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?"

It's also a cause of the problem described

[emj]

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..

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.

Re:Spelling and Grammar

[gEvil (beta)]

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.