![]() What about answering and asking questions in long strings of email? “People don’t make a good distinction between who the email is addressed to and who is CC’ed”Įven worse, the majority of people say it’s OK to use Reply All “if everyone can benefit from the information”-another situation that causes our inboxes to get clogged with unimportant messages. While others said their companies don’t use CCs with consistency and so they have to decipher each one to see what’s expected. Many people we spoke to said they assume a CC is an unspoken “FYI” and aren’t a direct action item. While close to 50% of people we spoke to said they don’t respond to emails not directly addressed to them, the other half say it depends (meaning they have to spend time reading them first). Yet few people respond to emails with purpose. Collaboration is a key part of any company's success. Yet despite this, there are no clear rules around when, how, and even if you should respond to an email chain. ![]() Each one needs to be decoded and assessed before you can make a decision on it, especially in long email chains.Īccording to an article in the Harvard Business Review, we lose 27 minutes a day just checking if emails require an action. Emails aren’t just tasks you can check off. One of the reasons we spend so much time in our inboxes is that it’s unclear what we need to do. Email chains are a nightmare and no one agrees on the right way to handle them What it seems to come down to is that if you check and respond to emails outside of work hours, your coworkers will too. “If I’m messaging someone in a different timezone.” ![]() “If I know it’s someone who will respond.” “Priority of projects can warrant whether they should get a response after hours.” “If I’m responding to someone else emailing me outside hours.” When we dug in further, it seems like the debate around outside-of-work-hours emailing is a bit of a chicken and egg situation.Įven though the majority of people are checking and answering emails outside of work hours, 68% said they don’t expect responses to work emails on evenings and weekends.Īnd for those that do, there were some common reasons why: But what about the expectation to respond to them?Ħ1% of people said they reply to work emails outside of work sometimes, often, or almost every day. In fact, 60% of people say they check email both before or after work hours.Ĭhecking emails outside of working hours is one thing. While a small majority of people say they only check email once or twice a day, two-thirds of people check at least once per hour and nearly 30% of people have their inbox open all the time and are checking constantly.Īnd this doesn’t stop when the workday ends. It’s probably no surprise then that most people check their inboxes frequently throughout the workday. Whether it’s innocently checking your inbox in the morning or replying to a message before bed, email blurs our work-life balance line. If you’re like most people, you probably have a bad habit of taking your work home with you. If you send emails outside work hours your team will too See how much time you’re *actually* spending on email and how it’s impacting your productivity with RescueTime. The respondents range from freelancers to employees at massive companies. To understand how people actually think about workplace email etiquette, we sent a survey of 25 questions to more than 700 workers (500 RescueTime users and 200+ non-users). What we learned from 700+ workers about workplace email etiquette ![]() If you’re a manager frustrated with miscommunication or a team lead trying to make your collaboration more productive, here’s what you need to know. With no universally accepted email etiquette playbook, our relationship with our inbox is (ironically) rife with miscommunication. And with no universally accepted email etiquette playbook, our relationship with our inbox is (ironically) rife with miscommunication. Most companies assume employees know the best ways to email (spoiler: they don’t). Language aside, what’s often worse than what gets written in these emails is how we deal with them. It has been a fortnight and I still have not received your latest status report…) ( Dearest X, I hope my email finds you well. While some people shoot from the hip with reckless ‘reply all’s’ and a lack of formal language, other emails sound like letters from the frontline of WWI. Despite being one of the main things we spend our time on, few people are ever taught how to email.
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