Email Ettiquette

A wise person once said: Communication is what the recipient does.Sure, you can user your role power to force him to do things your way, but it probably won't help anything.

Maybe the problem is in his time management skills or maybe he's "skimming" emails just as your unwritten standards (which are useless, by the way) and he's missing things, since "skimming" by definition is not very detailed.

Maybe he's right, the problem is that in a group inbox, it's nearly impossible to tell what is directed at a specific person.

Maybe he's right, he does get too many emails. It's a common problem in many organizations.

In reponse, some organizations have taken to standardized messages in the subject lines (and they love brackets for some reason), such as [Action Required], [No Action Required], [No Response Required] and others. It lets anyone who receives them quickly scan (or filter) those messages and figure out whether the message requires them to do anything or if it can just sit in the inbox for a while.

 How wordy are these instructions?  You say you try to give instructions in the first paragraph, have you tried breaking the instructions (or a summary thereof) out into a bulleted list?

You say that everyone should at least skim every mail in the shared mailbox, how many mails are likely to actually be relevant to an individual?  If that's likely to be below around 75% it might be worth having a rota whereby each person spends half a day or a day with their primary duty being to go through the mail box and for each mail decide who it is relevant to and forward it to their mailbox then file it away by project/service.  I've worked in offices with a similar shared mailbox that have done that and it worked.  The production lost by having one person reading the mails in detail was more than made up by everyone else having to only read the mails that were in their mailbox.  Added advantages were that it gave everyone visability of everyone else's projects/services/work and could feed into stats collection (mails tended to fall into categories of 'Spam', 'Non-spam Junk' (typically either announcement circulars or someone doing a Reply-To-All to an announcement circular) or related to a specific project/service) filing by project/service meant that by counting the mails for each project/service at the end of each day we got a rough indicator of which projects/services were producing a lot of traffic and therefore probably work).

 It is possible that he's a listener rather than a reader, there was a cast on this not long ago.  If this is the case then you need to consider what you can put in place to improve communications and then whether it is worth your time implementing that or if you need to find a way to shift him to somewhere more suited to his skills and behaviours (maybe somewhere less email oriented).

If you are somewhere that considers disciplining people with disabilities for the results of their disability ureasonable,  you might want to give HR a call and check that he hasn't disclosed a relevant disability (e.g. Dyslexia).  Even if he hasn't told you personally then the fact that HR know may, depending on local legislation, mean that it can be treated as if you knew and have acted unlawfully dispite that knowledge.  As Mark and Mike have said in various casts, as a manager you are the company.  If the company knows then it might be hard to prove that you didn't.  A 2 minute phone call can save hours of pain later.

Stephen

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Skype: stephenbooth_uk (Please note I'm on UK time)

DiSC: 6137

Experience is how you avoid failure, failure is what gives you experience.

To follow up with TomW's comment, our organization uses the "Action Required" verbiage in the subject line as a shared standard. If you receive an email with Action Required in the subject (or "AR"), and you're on the To: line, then you have a task assigned to you. You need to read the email to find and understand what that task is (and most of our managers are pretty good at clearly highlighting the go-do's with bullets, bold faced font, highlights, etc.).

Jason

I don't see this as an "either/or" situation. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to provide coaching and feedback to a direct on a mission-critical topic like communication. I also see it as an opportunity to improve email communications among your team. (See suggestions above about subject line coding, etc.)

You'll definitely earn your manager's paycheck if you can solve this one. I have seen plenty of people who blow off emails because "they're too busy." What that means is, they have selected other priorities as being more important. What it demonstrates is, they are either too in-experienced or too self-centered. A great opportunity for putting your MT tools to use.

Tactically, communicate with this person to determine why this problem exists. Strategically, look at your team's email habits to see if there are opportunities to smooth the flow.

This person is an adult, and no one else has this problem.

It's reasonable AND effective AND efficient to expect this person to read emails from you and action them.  The fact that everyone else can do it is nice, but it's only icing, it's not what's necessary - reasonableness.

You don't need to know why, anymore than you need to know "why" someone doesn't show up on time, or submit expense reports, etc.  These are reasonable expectations.

Expect it, tell him you do, and give him negative feedback when he doesn't.  Consider shot across the bow, and remember systemic feedback.

Mark

My response may seem tough or abrupt.  It's not - I'm just focusing on your responsibilities to the org, YOUR time, and the rest of your team.  It's a question of having the right focus.

Everyone's always complaining to us about being busy, and then we discover they're spending a bunch of time on THIS kind of stuff.  Time spent changing YOUR behavior to address one person's lack of meeting low-level reasonable standards is WASTEFUL of your time and arguably disrespectful to the rest of your team.

Email wil not do it. This person is resisting and you do not know why. Are they resisting responding to the the email or the instruction? Maybe its just you they are resisting? You have to TALK to the individual and find out what it is they are having a problem with.  Any time you invest now will save you in the long run either through the employee becoming a valuable asset for you or shortening the time to the decision to replace them.