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December 23, 2008
Sorry, I didn’t see your e-mail. Was it important?
The other day, my younger son misplaced his wallet. He thought it was in the car—the Nissan Versa that he and his brother drive—but he kept going out to the car, looking around, then coming back into the house.
“Are you sure it’s in the car?” I asked. I knew I should go out to help him look, but it was really cold outside, and the car scared me: It was filled with half-finished snacks, fast food bags, dirty clothes, and assorted other detritus from misspent and messy college life.
I suggested that Younger Son take the flashlight to shed some light on the problem. When that didn’t work, I sent his older brother out to help him—the same young man who had driven the car all semester and had been responsible for creating most of the chaos. (My theory was that since the mess was Older Brother’s natural habitat, he could navigate it easily.)
Thirty seconds later, the wallet was found. “It was right there in the middle of the floor,” Older Brother said triumphantly. “Easy!”
I simply had to see for myself. I ran out to the driveway and looked in the passenger window at the floor. The wallet was, indeed, right there, but it was surrounded by and partly covered by the following: Four water bottles. Three Fruit-by-the-Foot wrappers. Two winter gloves. (And a partridge and a pear tree? No, but there was a box of candy canes.)
Why do I share this little tale of domestic life? Because my sons’ car is a great metaphor for e-mail, especially the way it’s experienced in organizations.
Most of the e-mail employees receive seems to them like fast food wrappers and water bottles; in other words, like junk. And their inboxes get so messy as a result that even important e-mails can get lost in the clutter.
For instance, a couple of years ago, a major company needed to tell managers about an important change to their incentive (stock-based) pay—a change that was actually good news. So the head of HR sent an e-mail to affected managers. Imagine HR’s surprise when, a week or so later, the results came back: 20% of managers deleted the e-mail without reading it. Another one-third did not recall hearing about the compensation change.
What was the problem? According to managers we spoke to, there were two factors at work: The first was that managers didn’t recognize the HR head’s name in the “from” line, so they ignored or deleted the e-mail. The second was that managers had simply too many messages to pay attention to one that didn’t seem urgent.
My sons solved the car clutter problem by filling up a trash bag with junk. What can do you do to reduce the amount of e-mail so that employees don’t miss important messages?
Posted by Alison Davis at December 23, 2008 11:44 AM
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Comments
An increasing problem in all corporate environments. Here we encourage fewer names on the cc list, think before you send, and could you take a walk or pick up the phone instead. Another way we call out important messages is to beef up the subject line: Rather than just forwarding something, we might say "ACTION REQUIRED BY X DATE" or "YOUR APPROVAL NEEDED" before the subject.
Posted by: E. Okrent at January 19, 2009 02:25 PM