Tag Archive for 'email'

Does Local Culture impact email style?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 10, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
. 0 Comments

I was lecturing on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and when I got to the part about “write succinct, terse, clear mails” an attendee raised his hand to ask me, how would that be perceived by recipients in the United Kingdom? Turns out that they had a workshop on global cultural gaps and it included the notion that the British like to start with small talk and only get to the point later; so they ought to find very short emails rude!

Good point, that. Having also worked in a global corporation, I am very much aware of the importance of local culture differences. We too had classes on how to interface with colleagues from distant lands; good thing too, considering my nation’s no-nonsense approach to conversation (to put it mildly). On the other hand, with email loads out of control, who can afford to spend time on polite chit-chat?

I don’t know of any research that looks at correlations of culture and email style or verbosity. If you know of some, let us all know in the comments. I did ask a British colleague, and he tells me that although a polite opening was common in traditional emails, with the growth of smartphones, this nicety is being dropped (often along with any salutation) and the norms in the UK are becoming aligned ever more closely with the US.

What do you think? Do people in your culture welcome excessive brevity in communications – or is it perceived as too abrupt and uncivilized?

Do share!

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 15, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years.

More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms.

I’ve been preaching a move from email towards other platforms – internal social networks, blogs and RSS feeds, shared workspaces and so forth – for some years now; but this is the first time I see a large corporation deciding to make such a bold leap. And they’re likening the situation to the trend of curbing physical environmental pollution in the aftermath of the industrial revolution – a bold analogy.

Of course God is in the details, as the saying goes; it is interesting and important to consider what is involved in this plan. Obviously email itself is not going away entirely; they will need it to communicate with their external customers and stakeholders. And they will need a method to bridge external email and internal networking: if you want to forward a message from a client to a coworker, you will not want to start cutting and pasting, especially if the coworker needs to respond to the original sender. But three years should be enough to solve such issues if they have their mind set on it, and they clearly do.

The most heartening fact in this story is that the deal seems driven with great enthusiasm by the CEO. Furthermore, this CEO sounds convinced of what I’ve been saying for 15 years: email overload imposes a severe toll on the company’s ability to succeed. With such role modeling and leadership, Atos Origin should have a good chance at making this drastic change a success.

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 10, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion
. 3 Comments

I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails.

I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they claimed this arrangement would confer on me. It was “Credit notification – know as soon as your credit arrives“. In other words, they would send me an email when I get each new monthly credit. Which would be very useful if we used an arcane and complex calendar system like the ancient Maya priests had; but with the Gregorian calendar, the new credits arrive once a month, regular as clockwork, and wait in my account until I use them. No mystery. No need to be notified. I can figure out when the month begins without adding to my busy Inbox  a new stream of useless mail.

We have spammers for that, after all…

Slower or faster? Email vs. Voice

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 4, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion
. 2 Comments

When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled…

The same situation exists when we compare Voice telephony and Email. This was made clear to me during a lecture on Information Overload that I gave this week. I was discussing the interesting experiments done with “No Email Day” in various companies – encouraging people to use face to face or telephony instead of email during the chosen weekday. One attendee raised her hand and asked whether this would not add to the overload, because people would engage in lengthy conversations instead of brief emails. Her thought was of shooting off a short email and forgetting it, whereas a conversation might drag on much longer.

This struck me as interesting, because I often teach the opposite lesson – that a short phone call can often resolve an issue that could degenerate into an endless ping-pong of emails; that is, voice can be faster, not slower. The scenario here is that people engage in a lengthy exchange of emails until someone picks up the phone, and puts an end to whatever is causing the thread to continue. Direct synchronous conversation, with its much richer spectrum of nuances, can remove ambiguity, clear away misunderstandings, and force people to get down to making a decision on the spot.

So – which is faster? Obviously, it varies – depending on the context and on people’s habits. Perhaps the bottom line is that what matters is not the medium, but the people – those who are focused and effective will know how to apply any medium for rapid achievement of the desired results at work.

Outside work, by contrast, I definitely recommend conversation, preferably over a good cup of coffee…

Six steps to elicit a response to your emails

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 20, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

I’ve discussed the harmful effects of Online silence, the phenomenon where you send email and no reply arrives for days. Since this phenomenon persists, driven by the endless flood of incoming messages, here are some tactics to apply when you run into it.

  1. Be proactive. Write your emails to encourage a response – short, to the point, and with clearly marked action items. Make the subject reflect the urgency and the required response: “Can you send me the financial summary by the Tuesday staff meeting?”, not “Staff”. If the mail is fast to read and process, the response is far more likely to be swift.
  2. Wait. If you get no reply, you need to decide wisely how long to wait before taking further action. Wait too long and your work will suffer; be too hasty and you’ll come across as a nuisance, with equally adverse results. The optimal time to wait depends on the situation – who your recipient is, how busy they are, what your relationship is, and in particular, what action is required at their end. If you asked someone to do some lengthy work for you, you can’t rewrite them the next day: it’s obvious they’ll need a few days to find the time!
  3. Resend. Once the time has elapsed that you deem appropriate, you can resend your message. Prefix the previous subject with RESEND: , in capitals, to make it stand out; most people may respond more readily if they realize their guilt. Add to the body a polite one-liner, whether “Still awaiting your response…”, or “I really need this by <date>”, or simply “??   : )” and sign “Thanks, <yourname>”. Keep this short and lighthearted, matching the tone to your relationship with the recipient.
  4. Phone. Either after the resend fails to elicit reaction, or in its place, pick up the phone and call. If you get the guy in person, that’s best; if not, you can leave a message pointing them to your email – note that many people have faster turnaround for voice mail than for email processing. And with the persistent caller ID that is becoming ubiquitous on cellphones, just calling and getting no reply may cause the person to see that you called and call you back.
  5. Get help. Assuming the recipient is in a remote location, try to find someone there who can grab them in person for you – someone more likely to respond to you because they’re less busy, or your friend, or because it’s their job – like the recipient’s admin or TA.
  6. Know when to give up. Sometimes it’s just no use… if the recipient is not a close associate, they may simply choose not to interact with you. The important thing is to identify the point of diminishing returns, and stop trying to communicate. After a couple of resends, it just makes little sense to persist.

One thing is relevant to all these steps – always imagine yourself in your recipient’s shoes. It’s rare that they ignore you out of malice; try to imagine their workload, their daily routine, and where you fit into it. Then optimize your communications to be considerate and effective for the them as well as for you. It’s polite – and it’s effective in eliciting a reply!

Why email is more stressful than paper mail

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 6, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

I was trying to get my email Inbox down to zero for the weekend, and though I was making good progress, I felt a mounting sense of stress. Realizing this, I stopped to introspect: why stress? Here I was, going down the list of incoming messages, deleting the useless ones and addressing the more important stuff, and generally doing a good job. Why stress, rather than a feeling of accomplishment?

So I examined more closely what I was doing in the process, and I realized that many of the emails were carrying “gifts” of additional activities. One message might direct my attention to a possibly interesting video on YouTube; I’d then go and look at it. The next mail might ask me to attend a seminar, providing a link to the agenda; I’d click the link and go check it out. And maybe I’d need to know where the location was, so I’d go into Google Maps to check that too; then, if I decided to attend, I’d go to another link to confirm, and put an item on my calendar. The next message would be that someone wants to connect to me on LinkedIn; off I’d go to check this person’s profile. And so on.

Compare this to the process of reading incoming mail in the old days. There too you had an Inbox – a tray marked IN – and you’d go down its content item by item. But those items would be much more self-contained. None of them would cause you to branch out to a far away place to check more information; if you needed information, it was right there in the envelope. In today’s multitasking world, you keep making short forays into the infinite Web, jumping from mode to mode, from medium to medium, back and forth… I’m no psychologist, but I suspect that this activity format is part of the reason why email processing is more stressing than just slitting envelopes, reading the content and maybe jotting a directive to one’s assistant (or to oneself) about what to do with it.

What do you think?

The Offense system of Email Overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 24, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 0 Comments

I was delivering my Information Overload Jump Start workshop to a manager forum and we were discussing the reasons they were sending all those unnecessary messages to each other, when one of the participants made a perceptive comment: “We use”, she said, “the Offense System of addressing email!”

What she meant, she elaborated, was that when in doubt you simply copied anyone in the organization who might be offended if you left them out. And since this is the path of caution, you bet they were sending to everybody and his brother – simply to be on the safe side! Consider what this meant:

  • Those few who needed the message got it normally.
  • Those few who didn’t need the message but would be offended got it, thereby becoming less productive (but full, perhaps, of a satisfying warm feeling of being loved).
  • The rest, those who didn’t need the message and would in fact not have been offended, became less productive and did not even feel the love.
  • The sender, having caused so much harm to their coworkers’ productivity, would still be happy in the expectation that no one would get cross with them.

There is an alternative system that I might advocate instead: I might call it “The Necessity system“. In this system, you send the message only to those few who have a real necessity to read it; the proverbial “Need to know”. Everybody else is allowed to do their job undisturbed.

And what do you do about the few non-recipients who might, in fact, take offense? You handle them – you explain to them, politely but firmly, that none of you is getting paid to waste the stockholders’ money by reducing productivity. Or, if one of the complaints is justified, you apologize and send that person the message…

So – which system does your organization use?

Is the brevity of SMS language compromising our emails?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 12, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

An interesting observation in a client meeting: we were discussing the contribution of language gaps in a global company to email overload, and one participant pointed out that these days many younger employees use the super-abbreviated “SMS language” in their emails, leading to more misunderstood messages than in the past.

Writing brief emails is not a new device; I notice it particularly among senior executives, who respond in one-liners and even in ALL CAPS to maintain communication despite the overload. These, however, tend to be older people and they write these brief emails in English. For instance, a baby boomer might write “PLEASE CALL ME, I NEED YOUR REPORT BEFORE 4PM”. A Gen Y employee, meanwhile, might put this as “pcm I nd ur rpt b4 4pm“…

The infiltration of SMS style into other media is already seen as a problem in the education system; pessimists are predicting an ominous future for language skills, a debate I won’t go into here. But in corporate email, a medium already prone to misunderstanding, changing the Lingua Franca from English to “txtese” may aggravate the problem – especially where we have different generations trying to collaborate.

Note that the effect is not only on misunderstandings; in most cases a recipient may identify that risk, and this results in a cascade of follow-on emails to try and clarify what the sender had meant. More emails, more pressure, less time, more incentive to abbreviate… do you see a vicious circle here?

I’m interested to hear to what extent you see this problem at your own workplace… please share in the comments!

Five tactics to prevent your email from reaching the wrong eyes

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 3, 2010
in Individual Solutions
. 0 Comments

In a previous post we saw that it’s all too easy for your email to find its way to people you hadn’t meant it for. So, what can you do when sending a sensitive message, to prevent such embarrassment (or worse)?

Here are some tactics to consider:

  • You can put in the message an explicit plea for discretion, such as “For your eyes only” or “DO NOT FORWARD”. You can also put “[Private]” in the subject, though that may draw the attention of hackers and people passing by an unlocked PC in the recipient’s absence. But of course, this is only a first line of defense…
  • Before hitting SEND, read through the To and CC fields carefully – make sure you’re sending to whoever you think you are. This is especially true if you’re mailing to a mixed group having people both internal and external to your company.
  • Be proactive: formulate sensitive messages as if you know they’ll leak. For instance, remove the “tail” of earlier exchanges, and then allude to it indirectly: don’t say “I agree with you that it was probably George who stole Jennifer’s wallet from her office, he always seemed dishonest to me”; say instead only “I think you’re right about what happened, and I’m not surprised, knowing the person involved”. Your correspondent will know what you mean, but if she accidentally shares your message no one else will.
  • Encrypt any really sensitive information in a file and attach it to your email. And don’t rely on Pig Latin; there are powerful encryption tools available out there!
  • And despite all that – you should always assume that sooner or later your mail will be shared with people you hadn’t intended to see it. If you can’t accept this risk at all, don’t send the message via email – period!

Lastly: you are a recipient yourself. Protect your friends and coworkers by not disclosing their messages to others, unless you’re sure they’d approve. Do unto others…

Speed vs. Thought in email communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 23, 2010
in Analysis and Opinion
. 1 Comment

Given that knowledge workers receive many more emails daily than they can possibly process, it is small wonder that some emails never get a response (the phenomenon called Online Silence, which I’ve discussed before). Indeed, the research shows that if a message isn’t replied to in a day or so, it is likely never to be answered.

There is, however, an interesting exception: messages that require an answer but also necessitate thought.

A great example are requests for LinkedIn endorsements (also known as recommendations). The way it works, in my experience, is this: Jack asks his LinkedIn contact, Jill, to provide a recommendation for him. Jill replies the next day “Glad to do it!”, but in fact does not do it that day, nor in the following week, nor, in some cases, in a month. Then, having completely forgotten about it, Jack has a nice surprise when a LinkedIn message announces that Jill has recommended him!

What is going on in this scenario is this: Jill does want to endorse Jack, since there is some degree of personal friendship between them (no one asks enemies to endorse them!). However, writing a recommendation requires some heavy mental lifting: you need to really think carefully what to write and how to phrase it to convey your exact intention. You need to clear some uninterrupted time to devote to the task, and in this age of the Soundbyte and the Blackberry this is a rare luxury indeed. So Jill puts the matter on her To Do list, but not at high urgency; this is a classic case of a task that is important but not urgent in her mind. Only after weeks have gone by does she decide to get it done, since letting it drop is not an option.

The same thing tends to happen to any email that is too important to ignore but too thought-consuming to do in one’s stride: emails whose processing involves reading long but valuable articles are another good example. Which is a shame, really, because in a sane world these thinking-related tasks would not be delayed for more than a couple of days; yet in our world we find it a real challenge to attend to them at all…