Slow email replies cause serious anxiety
bbc.com
bbc.com
If the person on the other end is feeling anxious about that exchange I
a) have no sympathies, none at all
b) feel that they don't understand the medium they're using (as confirmed by the "I could always pick up the phone" line at the end of the article)
I'm trying hard to suppress a "Booohoooo" reply here. Persons that concerned about exchanges (and IMs make this that much harder - I see so many passive aggressive "And?"/"You read it, what do you think?" messages around me, because people assume that "Saw the message" equals "Has time and incentives to answer me right this very moment") need to see a doctor. If you can describe this as anxiety, you might need help.
That and that they don't have a reasonable expectation to be the single most important contact of the person they're currently talking to.
Both would help. Wire might or might not be a good service, but is really unrelated here.
FD: I made it
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Email Sender:
- If you need an answer urgently ("urgent" defined as one of two things: it's an emergency, or the information you are lacking is a blocker for what you are currently working on), either pick up the phone and call the other party or send them an IM, instead of emailing them.
- Keep your emails concise and to-the-point. No essays.
- Don't mark your emails as "High Importance" or ask for a read receipt. We treat all emails as high importance, and you can feel assured that your email will be read within 4 hours max (see below).
Email Recipient:
- Read all incoming emails within 4 hours max and respond after reading if possible. If you don't have the information the sender is asking for, or are otherwise not ready for a full response, send a short one indicating that a) you read their email and b) you will respond within X hours, where X is a number that is equal to or less than 24.
- If the response is complex, summarize it as best as you can, and indicate that you will follow up in person or via phone to discuss the details. Don't write an essay back.
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The purpose behind these set of rules is alignment of expectations for both parties. Ever since we implemented them, the vast portion of our "friction" with regards to team communication has disappeared. For example, it's really, really nice to never have to wonder if someone has read your email, and also really nice to know when you can expect a response (which means you can decide whether you want to wait for a response or work on something else in the meantime).
We also have a set of rules for IM (we use Slack) and phone, but those mostly say "be online and available, or mark yourself as Away or Busy as appropriate and people will respect it".
I have a rule for my coworkers: I'm not available on IM. Either email me (if not urgent) or call (if urgent). IM is the worst of both worlds, where people can contact you instantly, expect instant responses, and not feel bad about not responding to your response.
With a phone call, they cannot call me, and then stop talking in the middle of a conversation. With IM, they can.
(Of course, I still use IM to communicate stuff like URLs, etc when on the phone).
> We treat all emails as high importance, and you can feel assured that your email will be read within 4 hours max (see below).
If they need me to respond within 4 hours, they should call me.
Oh God. I hope this is "within business hours"? Because I sleep for more than 4 hours at a stretch, thanks.
(Also: occasionally a comprehensive reply requires an essay, or the equivalent. What do you do in this case?)
Use a bulleted list or a diagram.
One of the worst e-mails I ever saw was about lifecycle of a token for PCI compliance, just a solid screen of words. My colleague who received it sat for an entire afternoon to parse it and drew a UML activity diagram from it, which he sent back to the mailing list to rapturous thanks. The original sender received only scorn, even though the was the 'authority' on the issue.
1) correspondents are prevented from using email as chat, i.e. from burning a lot of his time 2) people write more result-oriented emails, knowing they will have to wait for his response for a day 3) the total volume of emails reaching him decreased because a lot of the issues people (want to) email him about often solve themselves within a day, so people don't bother emailing him about them anymore, knowing that he won't be able to help them in time.
Note: tenure may be required. Predating the email system helps, too.
If I hit "send", and the ball is in someone else's court, then it's usually somewhat of a relief.
If only recruiters and hiring managers took this seriously! They've been the worst communicators I've ever experienced in my professional life--as the applicant. I'm cool with ignorance of an initial application. That's normal. It's just after I interview with a company 2 or 3 times for a position and then they ignore my communication that I become quite annoyed.
Example 1: I am currently waiting on a response to a second in-person interview I had with a number of people at company X. I was told that I would "hear back next week" from the hiring manager. 2 weeks later, I sent an email to check in. 1 week later, still no response.
Example 2: A while back with the much more well-known company Y I was told that I would "receive feedback soon" by a recruiter after they had flown me out and had dedicated basically a half-day worth of interviews for me with their team. I followed-up 1 week later and received a message that "the team has been busy" and that they'll "get back to [me] next week." I sent another email checking in 2 weeks later. Ignored. I tried again 2 or 3 weeks later after that. Ignored again. And just because I still had the recruiter's email address, I followed-up 2 months later and finally got an email that the position had actually been removed.
Until you respond, the sender doesn't know if you received it or not (maybe there was a server or network problem on one end or the other; maybe it went into your spam folder), if you noticed it or not (maybe it was overlooked?), if you read it or not (too busy? blowing me off? mad at me? I'm not important enough?), and when you'll get around to doing something (should I count on it happening today? tomorrow? next week or month? ever?). They wonder if they should send another message (too pushy? but if the recipient didn't see it for one of the above reasons, sooner is better than later). They are operating in the dark unknown, and imagine all sorts of things. Effectively, you've set no expectations for them.
I know that, because I noticed how I felt and thought when I was on the other end. Our customers seemed much happier, even if response times (an actual response to their problem, not just a confirmation of receipt) and service completion times didn't change.
It doesn't have to be arduous. The four words you wrote above are enough. Or, "Hi Bob, I'm on another task at the moment, but I should be able to look into this in a couple of hours. Will be in touch." has a significant calming effect, and will often buy you extra time.
Of course, Bob might just say "this can't wait a couple of hours" but that's a separate chapter in human relations. :)
Somewhere in time and space, people are trying eat lunch right now.
Even SMS gets a tape delay for the first response. What if my phone was on vibrate in my coat pocket, hanging in the closet? After that first response, you'll know I have it in hand, so I'll make with the snappy replies, since I trusted you with my phone number to begin with.
Chats? The window was minimized. What do you want from me? Blood?
Emails may or may not enjoy 24 hour response times. I don't check all of my email addresses on a daily basis. Work emails are starkly divided from personal emails, for legal reasons regarding domain names (DNS) and bare metal server locations and territorial jurisdiction. Some animals are more equal than others.
If they have a problem with that then that really is their problem, not mine.
If you have a problem, what do you think is the solution? If you need something, what exactly do you need? You want to contact me, what's your phone number and when are you available? You don't feel great, why? How can we solve the problem?
It's super important to not hurt people feelings and speak right and that takes a lot of my time (especially as a non-native English speaker.)
On the other end I commit to read every emails.
I used to fuzz and wait until I had the ultimate, perfect reply.. usually like 12-48 hours later. Turns out that is the wrong approach - for the reasons outlined in this article.
> On the other end I commit to read every emails.
That was my defense too! I iterated it over and over to my team (my bosses would get preferential treatment...), but noone would believe me - unless I responded. People tend not to believe invisible things.
a) pre-composes a reply with a canned response (but lets you edit it)
b) reminds you if you don't end up replying within some time (perhaps even parses that time out of what you ended up writing in that response)
Seems like it only does the reminder part though.
These are going to seem constructive criticisms for people with whom you share communications preferences. That ought to be a lot of the people who read HN. Information-driven people, in a sense.
Outside of that group, good luck if you ever have a boss or colleague who prefers rapport and empathetic communication over the more direct, rational style you prefer. You are going to continually wonder why that boss expects you to read their mind. They are going to continually wonder why you can't consider others' needs from time to time, and put yourself in their shoes.
A tough reality for those with a strong "just the facts" bias, but a commitment to read every email is laughable in this context. Without stepping outside of your comfort zone and learning to accommodate different communication styles, you are vulnerable to the sort of emotion-driven problems that come crashing down right at the most inconvenient time.
That hit home for me. I once got called down to HR to find my boss there. I discovered at that moment that she was frustrated with how long it was taking me to do my job. Part of my job is pulling data for mailings out of our database. We have ~1 million constituents, and regularly send mailings with tens of thousands of recipients. She had performed that role before me, and she felt that it could be done much more quickly that I was performing it.
Turns out, I could perform the task as quickly as she expected, but I had totally misunderstood a conversation we had months earlier. Word had gotten to my boss that a person had called in because of a factual error on a piece of mail we had sent them. She came by my desk and asked me about the error, as I had specifically said the file was 99.5% error free. I mentioned that the incorrect information had been put in the database by someone else, and the error rate was about what I had expected. She told me that she wanted 99.9% error free mailings from then on.
Later on, I sent her data for another mailing. She came by my desk and asked if the data was 100% correct. I said I was confident it was 99.9% correct. She said we couldn't have any errors this time, and we needed to make sure that the data was 100% correct. I told her that it was fundamentally impossible to be 100% sure the data was correct. She said that she understood, but she wanted it 99.99% correct, as we couldn't mail constituents information that was wrong. I said it would probably take 10x longer to run the data, but I could do that if she wanted it. She did, so I proceeded to make sure the data was 99.99% correct.
She was absolutely flabbergasted when I brought these conversations up. To her, she thought 100% confidence meant "pretty damn sure" and 99% confidence was somewhere around "It's probably right, maybe." From my perspective, 99.5% correct meant we'd have 5 or fewer bad rows for every 1000 rows in the data.
It was so weird for both of us, because we both thought we had been incredibly clear with the other person. I thought I had been very clear with my point -- I had spoken with her about how long it would take to ensure the data was 99.99% correct several times, because I was concerned about the delay. She had thought she was being emphatic, ad I was just being a pain in the ass. The thing is, that I'm generally not particularly hung up on the difference between literal meaning and figurative meaning, and she generally pretty clear when expressing what she wanted in technical conversations without hyperbole. So she hadn't even considered that I was interpreting her comments literally, and I hadn't considered that she was being hyperbolic.
It was definitely a huge learning experience for both of us. We had both been really stressed for months because we failed to communicate effectively with one another, despite both of us recognizing the same problem and trying to bring it to the other person's attention.
Just tell her you're giving it 110% effort :-)
I'll just make 55% of the rows doubly accurate. The other 45% of the rows... well, we just won't talk about those.
> When you use actual numbers, they should mean what numbers mean
That's what I thought, but percentages seem to be thought-terminating cliches for most people. I generally use ratios when presenting information to most people as a result, but I really thought my manager and I were on the same page. This issue certainly wouldn't have happened if I had described our error as "1-in-200" from the start.
I report directly to the director of the organization now though, and in addition to being much more pragmatic about necessary trade-offs, he is pretty hands-off. I think a hands-off style to management goes a long way to reducing communications errors. Each conversation becomes much more important when you aren't having them just for the sake of having them, so everyone seems to pay attention more.
If you ever find yourself using a percentage you're often better off switching to normal numbers. "1 in 10,000"; "50 out of 100"; "9,999 out of 10,000". This is especially true if you're communicating changes. "Risk rises from 1 in 10,000 to 2 in 10,000", rather than "100% increase in risk".
I already know that people don't work 24/7, I even understand timezones. If I fire off an email, I'm totally cool if they pick pick it up in the morning. But then I get prematurely excited by an "immediate" response which turns out to be just a bot telling me what I already know.
In engineering environments, phone calls also tend to be ineffective ways to communicate technical information, whereas email threads (terse or not) preserve the history and context of decision making processes, which can be revisited or cited as needed.
Also, nowadays more and more people simply hate the experience of talking on the phone and would prefer that it didn't even exist in their lives as a communication device. So there's a whole personal preference angle that's independent of the pragmatic/effectiveness angles.
None of which is to say that there's anything wrong with a phone call, just that it really depends on where you work, what you do, who you work with, what they do, etc.
I wrote a comment elsewhere, but for me, IM is worse than both. It grabs your attention as immediately as a phone call, but the one who initiates it can leave you hanging wasting more time than a phone call would.
If someone called me and started talking to me and then just stopped (without hanging up), that would be a no-no in most places. Yet this is acceptable behavior in IM.
If you are using IM and working on something while busily responding to IM's, you are multitasking, which is what I want to avoid. If you need it within a few hours, call me and let me know. Otherwise email me and I'll get to it at some point (usually the same day).
Where does this bizarre communication anxiety come from?
I think part of the problem comes from differing opinions on what is actually "time sensitive". I think a lot of the trouble comes from someone using a time-sensitive communication method (phone, physically coming to your desk) on something the other person doesn't see that way.
I certainly have less empathy for someone that has time-sensitive problems through their own poor planning (aka "Your failure to plan is not my emergency"). Everyone makes mistakes, but some people seem to continually have their own self-created emergency all the time, and it's completely draining.
Also: I found that it helps to have a rule in your email client that says “if I am not in the To: field, move this to the folder called CC”.
That is a folder you can safely (1) ignore.
Similarly, one _could_ add a rule “if there are over 3 people in the To: field, move this to the Read Later folder”, but that is quite risky.
(1) not quite, as long threads may evolve to contain questions for you without people adjusting the list of addressees, but that’s the fault of the senders.
Your slow email replies are causing serious anxiety
citing one anecdote, then four paragraphs later:
there are no statistics or research on just how anxious people get when e-mails go unanswered
If you use email for time sensitive communication - it is your fault.
I don't check my email more than once every 2-3 hours, assuming that I am actually working and not screwing around in a reactive pattern.
Choosing an appropriate level of communication severity and urgency should really be business 101.