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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.
haha! suck it paranoid bastards!
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?
Them's fighting words!
That's often kind of the point isn't it?
You don't trust someone to do their job, possibly they've been screwing around or taking their sweet time.
A swift CC to the boss and a "hey, what's the progress on this?" is one way to get it moving.
On the other hand, doing it all the time is poor form if it's really a one to one conversation where escalation isn't needed.
If metrics are poor, cc'ng the boss is the only way he will know what you are working on.
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Of course, it isn't meant to make them feel trusted.
99% of the time I cc' my boss it's because the co-worker is trying to get me involved in something I shouldn't be, or make a "end-round" my boss.
I don't have time for that shit.
1. The first email is only between the two pertinent parties.
2. If there is no response, the second email has the other person's supervisor CC'd.
3. If there is still no response, the supervisor's supervisor is CC'd
4. Repeat until desired results achieved, or reprimanded. (I've yet to be reprimanded).
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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).
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
By the time you have to CC the boss about coworkers BCC usually works better.
It's not like this was the first time. What you want is for him/her to do his/her usual bullshit, but for all to see.
The fact that I'm CCing the boss says: 'I don't trust you' not 'you should feel less trusted'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Where did the money come from for this useless "study"? Everybody knows this. I only CC the boss when either I know he's watching the project, or the person I'm email needs prompting to get their shit done.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
http://bjk5.com/post/718871964... ... 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."
"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.
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.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
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Fear and Low Psychological Safety is the the goal of many a corporation. I worked as a temp for many companies and.. sorry, this is the main theme of most. Management, in their twisted and convoluted minds, they think that somehow they will get more work out of you if you are sad and divided up. Maybe they think that brief socializing is "unproductive" and don't understand that friendly bonds that foster true team spirit are important for good mental health and working better together? Or they think that laughter is counter productive, and rush to see what the "problem" is the second you laugh? (P.S. Stay far away from people who gossip!, Or as you say C.C.)
The fact that you listed those interesting cases indicates that the "HR Legal confidentiality training" didn't work.
Or, if you are asking a peer who you do not manage and has his own tasks, to do something you ask, you CC the boss who will resolve priorities. Or, if you talked to the boss and he asked you to ask peer to do said thing, you CC the boss. Generally I expect the boss to be controlling resources and managing priorities, he really ought to be copied on a lot of mails. If that peer is doing exceptional work that he doesn't even have to do, CC'ing the boss is also the way of making sure the boss knows said person is doing really well, I also CC the boss on that sort of thing. I want good people to be incentivized to stay every bit as much as I want to help identify bad people who can be incentivized to leave.
I was nervous about people CCing the boss when I was fresh out of college, but I got over it the hard way. The consequence of NOT CC'ing the boss, in my experience, is people not delivering and the boss blaming ME, and asking why he wasn't CC'd. So now any time I am making a request that involves real work, and asking someone to stop doing what they're doing, I CC the boss.
Honestly the only person with a legitimate reason to complain about CC'ing the boss, is the boss. That has never happened.
If people would pay attention and respond to emails without my/their boss CC'd then I wouldn't feel the need to CC him/her. Do your job and I don't have to go over your/our head(s).
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams" explains how supporting true team spirit is a key aspect of a high-performance organization. You can find some good evidence in there for your point.
The authors also explain better ways to manage email. Here are subheadings from the book chapter:
Chapter 33: E(vil) Mail 199
In Days of Yore 199
Corporate Spam 200
What Does "FYI" Even Mean? 200
Is This an Open Organization or a Commune? 201
Repeal Passive Consent 201
Building a Spam-less Self-Coordinating Organization 202
In general, their focus on good use of email is on helping people in organizations self-coordinate. It is more a vision of the manager as supporting good communications within and between teams versus than a manager being a hub of communications. So, to them, lots of CCs on emails suggest the possibility of some sort of organizational dysfunction which could be corrected by training people to be more self-coordinating.
That book is the second item I list here in a curated reading list on creating and sustaining high-performance organizations:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
Another book by one of the authors (Tom DeMarco) is listed as the first item: "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency"
But, this is all easier said than done in practice.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And in other news, researchers find ursine mammals typically defaecate in arborial landscapes.
Researchers found out that H2O, commonly known as "Water", surprisingly undergoes a phase transition at zero degrees Celsius under normal atmospheric pressure.
The paper is still under review, but our experimental studies on 594 samples of the substance found that liquid H2O becomes solid when cooled below this temperature. The presence of the solid state was confirmed by probing (poking) the substance with a sophisticated testing device (finger).
By testing with different temperature ranges, including randomized temperatures, it was confirmed that the transition happens at or close to zero degrees Celsius.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
...never let your boss get blindsided by anything you are even remotely related to if you can help it.
If you have information, reservations, disagreements with anyone, co-workers, customers, no matter, loop your boss in on it. The Boss is there to coordinate and clear obstacles so that you can do your job and so the company can achieve its goals (at least in a healthy, sane organization).
There are always two sides at least to everything and each "side" will go up the other chain of command. If you don't keep your management involved, they will look like fools when asked about it in their meetings and they have no knowledge or response. That will then come back to you.
If your colleagues are professionals, they will understand and will do it themselves.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.