Email Is One Of The Worst Ways To Communicate In An Office

Tech columnist Jeff Bennion argues that we could communicate more effectively and de-clutter our inboxes if we stop using email as the only method of communication in the office.

Most of you probably remember the days of email forwards. In the 1990s and early 2000s, people would communicate electronically with friends, acquaintances, and family members by email. Then spam emails followed, then email forwards followed. For you millennials out there, email forwards contained mostly urban legends that gave rise to sites like Snopes.com, or were jokes and musings like, “Why do you turn the radio down when you are looking for an address?” that got endlessly forwarded around. In other words, they were complete wastes of everyone’s time and cluttered our inboxes. Then social media came along and our grandparents and friends found a better outlet to share their unimportant garbage and we regained a little bit of our inboxes back.

What if we could do that with our work email?

The Dilemma of People Getting Married or Having Babies

I worked for a mid-sized firm with probably about 50 employees. On a fairly regular basis, we would get these firm-wide emails about so-and-so had a baby yesterday, or so-and-so got married, or so-and-so got promoted. Then, like a bag of popcorn in the microwave, reply-all emails would start popping off and reply-alls to reply-alls. I would get up to get a soda and come back to 19 unread emails. Or, I’d be in a depo and my phone would be beeping or vibrating like an excited R2 unit, and I’d think to myself, “Looks like we just hired a new receptionist or Sally had her baby or something.”

Then, there’s the Seinfeld-esque dilemma about whether you should reply-all or just reply. You want to congratulate the person, but you don’t want to be part of the problem, but you also want everyone else to know that you congratulated the person so they don’t think that you are the one jerk in the office that did not reply to the email. It all becomes one of the few socially acceptable times to use obscenities that does not involve driving or using a copy machine.

Status Updates Can Be Just as Bad

The problem is not limited to just office-wide congratulatory emails. Here’s a common situation: A team of one partner, three associates, two paralegals, and one legal secretary. The partner wants to know the status of a project that one of the associates is working on, so he emails everyone to ask for a status update, so he puts everyone on the email and asks one of the associates how the project is coming along. So, the partner emails the team: “What is the status of the project?” The associate responds: “Almost done, gave it to one of the paralegals to put the binder tabs together.” Paralegal responds: “I just started on the binder tabs today, should be done by the end of the day.” Partner replies: “Great, can you print out a copy of the memo and put it on my desk so I can start to review it, and give the final to the secretary to send to opposing counsel?” Associate replies: “Sure, I’ll do it right now.” Partner replies: “Thanks.” So, that’s over 50 emails sent and received just to find out the status of a project. Then those clutter emails stay in most everyone’s inboxes for years and distract people from getting their work done, as I mentioned earlier. Most of the people on that email chain need to know the status of the project just so they can be in the loop, but don’t need to stop what they are doing every few minutes to read the latest in the unfolding drama of the partner finding out the status of that one project.

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Do you remember this guy, who got so fed up with the interoffice emails that he responded with a lengthy firm-wide email with his feelings on the matter? Snarky or inappropriate as his response may be, he’s right that it is annoying. In fact, the subject of sending office-wide emails has long roots on this site.

What is the first thing a colleague says when they get back from a vacation? Usually, it’s something about how many unread emails he or she has to go through on the first day back, a lot of which are probably going to be pointless, but just-relevant-enough-that-you-have-to-read-them banter about status updates or something else non-critical.

How to Weed Out the Clutter with Interoffice Social Media Sites

I’ve had firm intranet sites. They are good for posting firm news or updates, but that’s about it. They are not a very good collaboration tool because that’s not their purpose. Yammer, on the other hand, is an interoffice social media tool.

Here’s a trailer explaining the features, but basically, it’s like a Facebook page for projects in your office – you can create a group for a project, invite people, post status updates, attach drafts of files, team to do lists, etc. You can do @ mentions of people like on Twitter to get their attention right away.

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Yammer was purchased by Microsoft a few years ago and integrated into Office 365, so a lot of you probably already have Yammer and don’t know it.

I’m not saying we get rid of email completely, but I’m saying we could communicate more effectively and de-clutter our inboxes if we stop using it as the only method of communication in the office.


Jeff Bennion is Of Counsel at Estey & Bomberger LLP, a plaintiffs’ law firm specializing in mass torts and catastrophic injuries. Although he serves on the Executive Committee for the State Bar of California’s Law Practice Management and Technology section, the thoughts and opinions in this column are his own and are not made on behalf of the State Bar of California. Follow him on Twitter here or on Facebook here, or contact him by email at jeff@trial.technology.

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