Discussion: View Thread

MG-ED-DVers,

Beyond poor netiquette within an individual message, what other
communication errors have you seen/heard of when using email as a
commuication or management tool within a business context? I'll volunteer
one first:

Send-it-to-the-whole-group syndrome. Parallel with sending a personal email
to a whole listerv is the sending of non-targeted email to a whole division
or project team because they happen to be on a group list. I recently was a
consultant to a project with a very specific set of duties. However, the
entire project team consisted of about 20 people. The project team was
organized into sub-teams working on specific parallel tasks, and project
team members were working from five different sites, coast to coast. One
person was assigned to the team as a sort of administrative coordinator.
She had just completed a masters program, and was young and gung-ho. She
had probably been taught about the importance of clear and frequent
communication in work teams. The result was, she sent every email, no
matter how specific to one person, or how large with included template
attachments, to everyone on the project team--during a period of crashing to
meet deadlines. The result was that everyone got 15-20 emails a day from
her, often of several megabites in size, of which maybe one or two were
actually relevant to anything a particular person was doing. Not only was
this time consuming and annoying, it led to special difficulties when people
missed the one or two important tidbits of information in the sea of "stuff"
(I hesitate to even call it data). Unfortunately, team members began to
ignore her missives, and delete the whole lot of them--which led to its own
difficulties because most of the information WAS important to somebody on
the team. I suspect this is a fairly common problem.

Any other examples of how e-mail can be disfunctional as a management tool?

Michael S. Cook, michaelscook@hotmail.com
Colleague Consulting
Laurel, Maryland, USA
Technical and management training and performance improvemen


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...what other communication errors have you seen/heard of when using email
as a
communication or management tool within a business context...

In Europe many find it acceptable to send attachments...perhaps because we
haven't had virus problems (yet) on the same scale as the US.

I regularly get messages introducing attachments, only for the attachment to
be missing. I then get a second mail with the attachment.

I have regularly teased people who make this basic mistake - but guess who
did exactly the same this morning?

Slightly humbled - I shall be less critical in future.

With your own example - why didn't anyone put her on the right track before
the problem became so big?

Kevin Fields
Lecturer: Tourism & Hospitality Management
Birmingham College of Food, Tourism
& Creative Studies

"Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire."
--- WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

> what other communication errors have you seen/heard of when using email
> as a communication or management tool within a business context...

I wouldn't label it an "error" per se, but I get many word processor documents
that are very short as attachments. In most cases, it would have taken just a
moment to cut and paste the text into an email message's body, which I prefer.
Doing that (a) reduces your chances of being flamed for sending an attachment,
(b) ensures no software compatibility problem, and (b) eliminates the
opportunity to send along a virus.

You lose some formatting, of course, but surprisingly little of significance.

--

Terry Calhoun, MA, JD, MAIP, Internet Editor
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
tcalhoun@scup.org | http://www.scup.org | AIM = "splendid1"
(734) 998-7027 | fax (734) 998-6532

If a golf ball could dream,
it would dream it was a disc!
- http://www.a3disc.org

I am a new participant to this list, but wanted to add another pet peeve to
the excellent list being developed:

Frequently I see people who send out email filled with HTML tags that come
across as so much meaningless garbage. (One noteable browser vendor does
this as well with their "newsletter".) This is done in an attempt to
"enhance" the message, but simply ends up confusing the recipient (similar
to the intent and results of using lots of emoticons!)

Steve Harper
============================================
PRAGMATEK Consulting Group, Ltd.
Steve.Harper@pragmatek.com
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"Technology . . . is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one
hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."
-- C.P. Snow
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