Reply All

by Charles Plant | Mar 21, 2012 | Management

As bad as the habit of copying everyone is the habit of Replying to All. This is a button that should never have been invented. While it is nice and easy to use, it is almost comical in seeing how people use it. Clearly not thinking, many people fill up others Inboxes with unneeded crap just because it is easier to reply to all than it is to reply to only those specific people who should have received the reply in the first case. Compound the Reply to All with a message that you have received as a CC in the first place and a an unnecessary Thank You into the mix and you have now just received and had to deal with five emails or so where you didn’t need to get any of them. This might be seeming a bit pedantic but when you add this problem up over the day it can be leading to a much larger problem. If you consider how many emails you send versus how many you receive, you get a picture of the size of the problem. In my case I added it up for a few months and found that I was receiving five times as many emails as I was sending. This means that 80% of the emails that I got were not significant enough to warrant even a response. While this may seem trivial, it is the shear volume of emails that people are getting, in my case 80% of them, that are making people feel overwhelmed and out of control at work.

CCitis

by Charles Plant | Mar 14, 2012 | Management

Thirty years ago, you would not have considered writing a memo and copying your whole team, your boss, and all of your co-workers just so that they could be kept up to date. No, you would have figured out who really needs to see that memo and would have physically copied and distributed the memo accordingly. Unfortunately, having the ability to send umpteen copies of an email out to all and sundry is just too easy. In fact it is much easier to send a copy to everyone in sight than it is to figure out exactly who needs to get the email and send it just to him or her. Some organizations have adopted a Cover Your Ass philosophy with regard to emails so that sending multiple copies is seen as the way of ensuring that you can never be blamed for not informing somebody about something. Unfortunately it takes time to think about who really needs to see certain information and since time is at a premium it is much easier now just to fire off an email and copy everyone. In the same camp as the multiple copy is the FYI. Just in case you haven’t received an email in which you have little interest, it is likely that someone on the original distribution list will take it as their responsibility to send it to you For Your Information, so they are seen as a good corporate citizen.

Because they receive too many emails and can’t possibly hope to read all of them thoroughly, I have heard from a number of people that they just don’t even bother to read things that they received as a CC and not as a direct recipient. They can later claim innocence if this is a problem as a result of this overall policy. Unfortunately, knowing this, people will probably stop sending things with CCs but instead put all recipients in the Send To line.

Not Responding

by Charles Plant | Mar 7, 2012 | Management

If someone walked up to you in the corridor at work and asked you a question, would you ever think of turning away and not answering them, basically ignoring them and their question? If someone phoned you and you picked up the phone to hear their voice, would you ever think of hanging up the phone without responding? Of course not and yet that is what is happening all the time with email.  Countless emails are being sent within and between organizations that are valid emails with valid questions requiring a response and yet people are somehow just ignoring those emails. Whether it is that the individuals are overloaded and can’t just get to their email or they are being just plain rude is unknown. I worked with an organization however where individuals from all levels of the organization regularly ignored emails, not responding or even acknowledging receipt. For people who are efficient with email and are working to accomplish some project, having someone not respond in a reasonable time is a severe problem. It means that the email has to be sent again or a phone call made or a visit made to that person. What would have been a one minute job for the recipient to reply, is now a half hour job to follow up several times and finally find the person to get an answer.

For some reason, email is seen as an anonymous tool that does not require the everyday niceties of work behavior. Just as a person in traffic is anonymous and can cut into a line with impunity, so to can someone hide behind email, ignoring requests and pretending that the act of doing so is not downright rude behavior.

Good Enough, Move On

by Charles Plant | Mar 5, 2012 | Management

The expression “Good Enough, Move On” has been adopted as an excellent catch phrase. Michael Caron explains what it means to him in this video blog.

http://vimeo.com/35915357