Email Etiquette
Topic(s): Boss Ahoy!
Submitted by: Anonymous – Thu, 10/25/2007 – 08:46
We had a recently hired Assistant CIO who proved to be embarrassingly incompetent. (You'll notice that I said "had", as her repeated screw-ups finally got her...ah..."retired".) One of her more widely known gaffs was an email she sent to the entire IT staff. It had an attachment which turned out to be huge enough to over-fill half the mailboxes in the department, rendering them useless until this missive could be deleted. The subject of the attachment – “Proper Email etiquette”, which included a section on the wisdom of sending a link to large documents rather than attaching them to multiple emails.
Comment: A worse type of management...
Is that one that finds a place in need of implementing rules but shoots down every attempt to establish them.
In other words: the "there are no rules and there won't be any if it's up to us, so we can do whatever we want" type!
asitnik – Thu, 10/25/2007 – 15:14
Comment: deficient staff
Her group is obviously mis-tasked. Someone needs the dedicated position of not allowing the boss to make a three course meal of her toes, instep and heel. After all, management can't solder; but they should know who can.
loadster – Thu, 10/25/2007 – 10:45
Comment: Deficient Staff?
Loadster,
I agree that IT management needs to understand but not necessarily be able to do. I do think expecting competent e-mail and office application knowledge is a given.
I use to work for another company where the VP of IT did not know how to use the MS Office calendar. This was my first clue all was not well in whosville. The VP is still there but 40% of the staff has left in the past 12 months -- care to guess if they were the top or bottom talent?
Anonymous (not verified) – Thu, 10/25/2007 – 12:01
Comment: Large attachments and email gaffes
Oh, man, you got me started! Recent issues here were: 1) A person was in a hurry (or late) sending an announcement, so when i couldnt' help her in 15 minutes, she sent the 2 MB image of runners in the email anyway, to 250 users here. Not an image of faces, just bodies and feet.
2) The United Way program we have inspires people to go all out with graphics. The guy sent a 4 MB attachment of a poster which is too small to read, so even if the recipient wants to read it, he has to print it out.
3) And somehow, worse than these, in my opinion, is the lady in New Orleans who sends out huge emails with attachments, and then the correction because she forgot something, and then another correction for something else. That one always goes to about 1,000 people.
*SIGH*
mycomputerman – Fri, 10/26/2007 – 15:16
Comment: Oh, and by the way
When I said the guy's 4 MB poster was too small to read, I mean too small on the screen, because it was too HUGE a poster, requiring a 11 x 17 printout in color.
mycomputerman – Fri, 10/26/2007 – 15:18
Comment: Attachment type
And I'll bet the attachment was a huge word document that could have been made into a reasonably-sized PDF file.
PhiloPharynx – Fri, 10/26/2007 – 17:13
Comment: That's why employees here
That's why employees here aren't allowed to email the entire address book. Only one account can do it and it's reserved for announcements that have to be approved by the administrator first. It's not a fix-all, but we definitely notice any attachments above 5 MB.
cdegeare – Tue, 10/30/2007 – 16:02
Comment: Another similar situation is
Another similar situation is the Paper Reduction Act that many organizations have adopted over the past several years. At our company, the details of the paper reduction act were printed in a 7 page document that was mailed (inter-office) to all of our 200+ employees. That's 1400 pages of printed paper telling people to print less.
We did start emailing most internal documents, but I think roughly 50% of the recipients printed the documents out of their email.
cdegeare – Tue, 10/30/2007 – 16:06
Comment: what rules
You just have to love that "Rules, but they dont apply to me" type of management.
That or we all just go crazy