No, email’s neither dead, deceased, nor demised. But neither is it, as Monty Python’s Michael Palin would have said, homesick for the geographical features of its native Norway. You don’t need me to tell you that email is alive and well inside your organization. Beautiful plumage.
But some would say it’s too alive. In many organizations, email is used as a dumping ground for information that doesn’t belong there; email can also be used for certain collaborative tasks for which it’s simply not suited.
He’s Not Dead, Jim
“Email: R.I.P.” Journalists and bloggers love to write this story over and over again. The hook is usually some survey showing that Millenials don’t use email, preferring to text their friends and chat with instant messaging, or that they only use social networking sites for their communication needs.
Of course, that’s only part of the story. While it’s true that young people may not see email as a social medium, they do perceive it as a medium for commerce, and one with relative formality. That’s encouraging for managers hiring college graduates straight out of school, because the reality is that most organizations would be paralyzed without email.
However, it’s clear that organizations need to encourage their “generation text” new-hires to make effective use of email. (We’ll discuss training for new starters later.)
Is Spam Killing Email?
Another canard that quacks again and again is that spam is somehow strangling email to death. It supposedly clogs inboxes and sucks bandwidth to such an extent that many are turning their backs on email.
Yes, spam is a big problem, in theory; but in practice, typical users’ experience of spam is practically zero. It doesn’t pollute my inbox, nor the inboxes of most other email users. Only a comparative dribble ends up in end-user quarantines, which most users never even consider opening. (If users need to religiously check their spam folders for false positives, the filter’s not doing its job and should be replaced.)
And spam isn’t even a huge user of bandwidth, despite Chicken-Licken-style warnings that spam is 70, 80, or even 90% of all email. The vast majority of spam is rejected or firewalled before it's even sent; the few messages that remain are a tiny fraction of your available bandwidth.
Spam is only a problem for organizations with obsolete spam filters, or filters that are otherwise need replacing.
Email Overload and Bankruptcy
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it. — Rudyard Kipling: If, 1895
Some users complain they receive too much email: they’re unable to deal with it all. For these individuals, the unforgiving eight hours of a day’s work — probably more — are filled with too many email correspondents demanding too much.
In extreme cases, users have declared email bankruptcy. Sometimes it’s an implicit, stoic revelation that we can’t deal with everything, so we shouldn’t try. If a particular message was that important, the sender will follow up.
In other cases, it’s an explicit, outward declaration — almost a cry for help. MIT’s Dr. Sherry Turkle is often credited with coining the phrase. She suggests a strategy of bulk replying with this form of words:
Thank you for your message. Unfortunately, my unread mail has become too numerous for me to process and much of it may by now be out of date. I will not be replying to any of my current messages. If you still need to contact me, please send a new message.
Bankruptcy is an interesting concept, but it rather defeats the object of an organization’s email network; it’s essentially an admission of failure. But, as the saying goes, failure is OK, so long as you learn from it. In the next section, we’ll learn from experts in organizational email use.
Email Advice for New Starters (and Old Hands)
Would you believe it? There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by... what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it. —Dale Carnegie: The Quick And Easy Way To Effective Speaking, 1962.
What should we tell new workers, fresh out of school? How should we train them to be part of our organizations’ email culture?
Here are some suggestions from two experts in this field; much of this advice is useful to young and old alike. It touches on overload, text messaging culture, prompting action, flame wars, and more.
We’ll begin with that old bugbear of those hiring young people: spelling and grammar.
Dr. Monica Seeley is an expert on email etiquette: “The lack of good communications skills is a major problem for organizations when they hire from generation Y and Z, regardless of sector and size,” she advises. “Most young new joiners do not realize there is a substantial difference between acceptable social communication between friends on Facebook and best practice in business. A recent survey we conducted revealed that poor grammar and spelling is regarded as sloppy and unprofessional by 63% of business people. It’s crucial to educate new hires in email best practice.”
Dr. Seeley’s other top tips include:
- Prioritize your email using the Pareto Principle. Identify the 20% of emails which give 80% of your business value. Be ruthless about the 80% of low-priority email. Remove yourself from as many lists as possible, and use rules to file less important email as it arrives.
- Don’t be a slave to new email. If email isn’t answered immediately, is it truly a life-or-death situation? The faster you respond, the faster the sender will expect a response in the future.
- For short messages, just write it all in the subject line and add EOM at the end: i.e., “end of message.” No need to repeat yourself in the message body.
- Include a date by which a response is needed. Or if no reply is necessary, say so either in the email or the subject line.
- Develop a handbook of words and phrases which are acceptable to your business.
Professor Dennis G. Jerz and his student Jessica Bauer add these useful points:
- People who get a lot of email scan the subject line to decide whether to open, forward, file, or trash a message. If your subject line is vague or blank, you’ve missed your first opportunity to inform or persuade your reader.
- If your email contains multiple messages that are loosely related, you can avoid the risk that your reader will reply only to the first item by splitting them up into separate messages.
- Don’t flame. Write it, revise it, liven it up with traditional Lebanese curses, print it out, throw darts on it, and scribble on it with crayon. Do whatever you need in order to get it out of your system. Just don’t hit Send while you’re still angry. And many a flame war has been started by someone who hit Reply-All instead of Reply.
- When you are writing to a close colleague, it’s OK to use smilies, abbreviations, and nonstandard spelling. These shortcuts are like sharing cold pizza with a family friend. But if you tried to share that same cold pizza with a visiting dignitary, you’d give off the impression that you didn’t really care.
Collaboration... With a Hammer
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. —Abraham Maslow: The Psychology of Science, 1966
Email is often used for tasks to which it’s not best suited — perhaps through lack of training, or lack of a better tool. Inappropriate use of email causes error-prone workflows and workforce frustration.
For example, collaborating on a document typically means people exchanging Microsoft Word files via email. When only two people collaborate, it’s fairly easy to manage. Person A writes draft 1 and sends it to Person B for review and edit; B adds her changes, using change tracking, and sends it back to A; who creates the next draft and sends it to B, and so on.
However, if the number of collaborators grows by only one or two, this ad-hoc, email-based process quickly gets out of hand. People start editing older versions of the document, changes get lost, and—inevitably—confusion, frustration, and error ensues. The basic problem is that the team members can’t hold in their heads a consistent mental map of the task’s current state.
Broadening the Toolbox
So, for these sorts of tasks, organizations should look for an alternative to the proverbial hammer of email. The market for collaborative tools stretches from the well-known groupware names, such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint, to the new and “trendy” entrants, which include Google Apps and Zoho Office.
These can be appropriate ways to solve the problem, but their relative complexity can also present initial barriers to adoption. Those barriers are a problem; ignoring them will often lead to failed projects. The reason users so often use email inappropriately isn’t only because it’s the hammer they already have, but also because email is easy to use — or at least, they already know how to use it.
In other words, the very ad-hoc nature of email is both blessing and curse.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with simpler collaboration tools such as wikis. These Web-based group editing tools are best known for their success in allowing 14 million registered contributors — plus countless anonymous ones — to write, edit, and discuss 17 million Wikipedia pages in 270 languages.
Wikis are excellent at enabling ad-hoc workflow, without requiring the centralized IT planning and control that so often drive users away from planned collaboration projects and back into their email comfort zone. I often recommend that, instead of mandating a complex solution, IT organizations help users invent their own workflow designs.
Using wikis, users can iteratively design their workflows on an ad-hoc basis. Only after the wiki-based task design has matured should IT departments look for opportunities to formalize the workflow, using tools such as Notes or SharePoint.
For all its faults, we’re stuck with email for the foreseeable future. Make sure that employees know how to use it effectively. Email’s ad-hoc nature is what makes it successful, yet that very nature presents challenges. Don’t be afraid to experiment with other ad-hoc tools that are better-suited to group collaboration.
Richi Jennings is an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal awards. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
