The Business of Email

At a Meeting not long ago the subject of appropriate use of Business email was raised, roundly discussed and eventually hotly debated. The contention revolved around whether or not one can really express emotion through this medium.

One position was that, email is a wonderful communication tool that allows the sender to construct their thoughts, enabling an accurate expression of just how they are feeling about the subject at hand. The other position was there was no possibility of this actually happening, considering that relaying one's real feelings can only be done in person with a two way dialogue

You may hold to either of these two positions or like me fall somewhere in between, but the whole subject gave pause for thought. The thoughts took me directly to my inbox to review the different styles of my various senders and a few things jumped out.

1- The inbox is really full and although it appears that it has been read, most of it seems not very important. I would guess that about 10% gets a response from me.

2- The rest of it for the most part seems meaningless or I just don't understand what is being said. (In that case I do not respond; if its important the sender will call and then they can explain) . Some of it is very imformative, but not too much.

3- Sometimes people like trying to carry on a conversation through the email. That's when I pick up the phone. It takes a lot less time.

4- There is a lot of inter office email that could have been concluded in the same way as above, especially considering that more often than not the person is no less than 50 steps away.

5- Some people write too much and a lot of it is flowery gobbelty-gook. Its hard to get past the first sentence of this type of issue.

6 - Much as we all enjoy a good laugh, now a days too many people send jokes. There is so much of this, there just isn't time to read through them all. Chain email never go beyond my desk, no matter what the implications of non compliance may be.

An observation. Following the point of view expressed by my colleague who felt that there is no way you can communicate emotion through email, I find that there is a danger, that could end up with a embittered co-worker, an angry boss, a disgruntled employee or heaven forbid a lost customer. Without that real time dialogue, there is a lot of room for lack of clarity and misunderstanding. Bad feeling when the sender had no such intention. That's not good.

Ted Barton

Here's a couple of links on the subject. Most have you have probably visited similar sites like this one about email etiquette http://www.emailreplies.com/

and this one that is a recent interview with guy who invented email
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/entdev/article.php/1408411

Lastly here's some stats:
E-mail in numbers
170 billion: Number of e-mails sent worldwide each day
2 million: Number of e-mails sent each second
49 minutes: Average time an office works spends each day managing e-mail
34: Percentage of internal company e-mails that office workers say are ‘unnecessary’
30-40: Number of times per hour workers check their e-mail
(Sources: Radicati Group, Gartner, Times Database)