Drowning in a Sea of E-mail
Do you send cover-your-butt e-mails? How about duck-and-run? Reply to all? Well, stop it, already. They eat up your work time.

By: H.J. Cummins

E-mail was so cool when Karen Oman started Certes Financial Pros, a temp agency in St. Louis Park specializing in high-end professionals.

"When you're real little it's wonderful, because you can avoid meetings, work at home, and all that kind of stuff," Oman remembers.

But 12 years and 30 back-office employees later, it wasn't so wonderful. When Oman recently asked her staff what most wastes their time, e-mails were right up there with the ever-unpopular staff meetings.

So, they created three new rules: If something is urgent, e-mail only those people you decide you must. If it's kind of urgent, raise it at the next weekly meeting. And if you just want to congratulate a co-worker for anything, write "Way to Go" or "Good for You" on the e-mail's subject line -- along with "nnto" for "no need to open."

Oman figures the changes have saved her staff 60 hours a week -- the equivalent of hiring 1½ more people.

"And human contact is not so bad, we're thinking," she said. "It's good to have a little yelling across the room."

After filtering spam and banning personal messages, companies still find themselves struggling with a multitude of e-mails.

It turns out that much of it is self-inflicted -- with, among other things, way too much "reply to all" and CC-ing going on. Time management consultants estimate that one-third of internal e-mails are unproductive.

To put their own house in order, employers sometimes are turning to technology.

The Leonard, Street and Deinard law firm in Minneapolis, for example, set up an "extra-net" so clients can retrieve their own legal documents electronically instead of the e-mailing their lawyers with every request.

But more than that, companies are trying to rid employees' of their own bad habits. For example, several have instituted an "escalation clause" that says if any e-mail gets more than three rounds of responses, it's time to stop the messages and call a meeting.

Without relief, employers said, they know people will miss important messages or just stop reading altogether.

"The proliferation of e-mail is phenomenal," said Kevin Gillis, director of product management at Ipswitch, a Massachusetts-based software company.

The Blame

One big culprit is the cover-your-butt e-mails, said Mary Cheddie, a board member of the Society for Human Resource Management, a national HR membership organization in Arlington, Va. That's when employees CC every manager up the line if they have an issue with their supervisor, Cheddie said.

Also guilty are e-mails sent by managers afraid to deliver bad news in person, said Cheryl Wyrick, professor of management and human resources at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. RadioShack may take the prize here: In August it fired about 400 employees via e-mail saying, "Your position is one that has been eliminated."

Then there are the reply-to-all-gone-berserk episodes. That's when someone unhappy about being on a mass e-mail hits reply-to-all to ask to be taken off; then someone mad about that hits reply-to-all to scold that person for using reply-to-all; then two other people hit reply-to-all to tell that person he was stupid to hit reply-to-all to complain about somebody else using reply-to-all -- and everyone on the original e-mail list gets to delete every round of this.

Besides gobbling up time, e-mails also risk misunderstandings.

"I had one this week," said Ann Rainhart, manager of associate professional development at Leonard, Street and Deinard. "I wondered, 'Is this person joking?' Well, they were, but I couldn't tell."

Some Fixes

In defense of the e-mail, Oman points out that it's still her best way to keep in touch with the 140 professionals Certes Financial Pros has dispersed to client companies.

E-mail is also a terrific tool for very analytical executives because they often express themselves better in writing, said Judith Glaser, CEO of Benchmark Communications consulting in New York. Still, Glaser advises them to run an e-mail past a trusted friend before sending it, to ferret out any zinger that might have tumbled into the message despite the best of intentions.

Of all recommended remedies, the first and most important is for everyone to take a moment to think before sending or replying to a message, said Jeff Ward, director of application support at Fulbright and Jaworski, a national law firm with a Minneapolis office.

"Sometimes a quick phone call can be more efficient than a round of 10 e-mails," he said. His firm also finds it helpful to require a partner's approval before any e-mail gets sent firmwide, he said.

Gillis knows one company that bans all internal e-mails on Friday.

"It's part of the dressed-down day, encouraging people to get out of their desks and walk down the hall to talk to people," he said.

One company now puts a label in the header for each e-mail -- urgent, important, or FYI -- so recipients know how to pick their reading, Glaser said.

Another time-saver is to put the desired reaction on the very top of the e-mail, maybe even in caps or italics, said Ilise Benun in Hoboken, N.J., author of "Stop Pushing Me Around."You think through, 'Do I want people to reply to me? Reply to all? Check on something for me?' " Benun said.

"Because people are skimming e-mail, you want to tell them right away, 'This is what I want you to do with this information,' " she said.

Employers are of two minds whether instant messaging is a useful alternative to e-mail.

Leonard, Street and Deinard is rolling it out before the end of the year, information technology director Terry Pressley said.

Pressley believes it will avoid some long strings of e-mails that happen now.

"People have a mini-conference online," he said. "Attorneys can have an instant message session while displaying a document on the [computer] screen. Right now, we typically attach a document to an e-mail, send it off, then they read it and mark it up, and send it back, and it keeps going."

Others worry about security risks, especially when an instant messaging reaches beyond internal use to outside the company. It's also notorious for heavy personal use.

Whatever choices companies make, it's time to tamp down the heap of e-mails at work, Ward said.

"I think that most people are learning some of these tricks, and over time they'll become accustomed to using them -- and more," he said.