CC'ing the Boss on Email Makes Employees Feel Less Trusted, Study Finds (hbr.org)

Do you ever loop your boss when having a conversation with a colleague when his or her presence in the thread wasn't really necessary? Turns out, many people do this, and your colleague doesn't find it helpful at all. From an article: My collaborators and I conducted a series of six studies (a combination of experiments and surveys) to see how cc'ing influences organizational trust. While our findings are preliminary and our academic paper is still under review, a first important finding was that the more often you include a supervisor on emails to coworkers, the less trusted those coworkers feel (alternative link). In our experimental studies, in which 594 working adults participated, people read a scenario where they had to imagine that their coworker always, sometimes, or almost never copied the supervisor when emailing them. Participants were then required to respond to items assessing how trusted they would feel by their colleague. ("In this work situation, I would feel that my colleague would trust my 'competence,' 'integrity,' and 'benevolence.'") It was consistently shown that the condition in which the supervisor was "always" included by cc made the recipient of the email feel trusted significantly less than recipients who were randomly allocated to the "sometimes" or "almost never" condition. Organizational surveys of 345 employees replicated this effect by demonstrating that the more often employees perceived that a coworker copied their supervisor, the less they felt trusted by that coworker. To make matters worse, my findings indicated that when the supervisor was copied in often, employees felt less trusted, and this feeling automatically led them to infer that the organizational culture must be low in trust overall, fostering a culture of fear and low psychological safety.

Comments

Wrong perspective

[TFlan91]

My boss gives me the freedom to handle clients as needed. He requests being kept in the loop for some of the more wealthy clients, but honestly I cc him most email correspondence.

CC'ing my boss ensures that my boss sees the ridiculousness from clients I have to deal with everyday.

My email etiquette

[Ogive17]

I only include the "higher ups" if they specifically requested to be part of the update/email chain or if the person I am trying to contact has been unresponsive through multiple channels (email/phone for suppliers, face to face discussions for internal people).

How Khan Academy handles email transparency

[Paul Fernhout]

http://bjk5.com/post/718871964...
"Every team has two email addresses: one for team members and one for the team's "blackhole." [For example: ] analytics-team@khanacademy.org and analytics-blackhole@khanacademy.org.
    The -team@ address is for emailing all members of the team. When you send email to analytics-team@, you expect everyone on the analytics team to read it. Subscribing to analytics-team@ means analytics-related email will land in your priority inbox as soon as it's sent, and you're expected to read it.
    The -blackhole@ address is for anything else that has anything to do with analytics. When you CC:analytics-blackhole@, you don't expect subscribers to immediately read it. Subscribing to analytics-blackhole@ means you'll receive analytics-related email, but it'll get filtered out of your inbox and you're not expected to read it unless you feel like it. ... Anybody in the org can join any of these email lists. analytics-team@ is usually just team members, but analytics-blackhole@ has all sorts of lookie-loo subscribers who're interested in analytics happenings."

The approach was derived from how Stripe does it: https://stripe.com/blog/email-...

So, given the original story, maybe this transparency approach has an extra side effect (perhaps unintended) of maintaining trust in an organization by avoiding the "directly CC-ing the boss" effect?

It's not quite BCCing the whole company -- like Tesen joked -- as it is more organized. But essentially the whole company could in theory read (almost) anything with that approach.

Re:Fighting words

[networkBoy]

Anytime I've been on a questionable CC of any boss I quietly and discreetly ask the sender (out of band, verbal if possible) why the boss was CC'd, prompting with is it a CYA thing, or is there a reason you need to look like you're applying extra pressure?

At least 80% of the time it's more about that person maintaining visibility to their boss that they're working (over there) than it is about trying to apply pressure to me or my team.
Now, this discounts all the times I already know why the boss was copied, like they ask me to do FOO, but FOO is not on my task list and I'm already oversubscribed so I push back, or they ask for BAR, but were super pissy, demanding, and rude, so I said "no", or I already know they work for a micromanaging asshat, so almost certainly are cc'ing in their boss at their boss's request.

-nB

Re:Duh

[networkBoy]

Funny aside (names obviously changed)

Had a co worker Bob L Smith his email was bob.l.smith@
HR Legal had a Bob L Smith who was bob.smith@

My co-worker got so many of these emails it was sad. He actually ended up having to go through HRLegal confidentiality training as that was the only legal way he could receive these e-mails, which he would then FWD and cc back the sender.

Among the interesting ones:
* co-workers were dating, caught in conference room gettin it on.
* porno (with one of the admins co-staring) being shown in conf room on projector at lunch; said admin was *not* part of the group watching.
* boss punched subordinate in face in meeting that got very heated, subordinate proceeded to joint lock boss, tear shoulder, and choke him out with a rear naked choke.

mind blowing, and made my dept. feel rather boring.