Reply in a Timely and Appropriate Manner

There are few things that annoy people more than not getting a response in a timely manner. The problem is that ideas of exactly what “timely” means vary from person to person and situation to situation. Way back when I used to manage an IT help desk I treated all of my business-related email much the same as I would have answered a help desk call, lobbing back a response as soon as I could come up with an answer. I think that’s the way many of the people at my firm, used to dealing with attorneys who treat everything as an emergency and expect white glove treatment, tend to deal with their email. But now that I’m focused on managing trainers I’m operating under a much more relaxed paradigm. There just aren’t that many training-related emergencies. The rule that I’ve set for myself is to respond to every message within half a day. So if I get a message in the morning I’ll reply to it by that afternoon. If I get one late in the day I’ll make sure to respond by early the next morning.

Of course there are exceptions. If someone has a simple question I can answer immediately I try to do so. If they have managed to come up with one of those rare training emergencies I get back to them right away. If someone important needs something they go to the top of my list. This isn’t brown-nosing, it’s covering my own ass. And if you don’t think there are VIPs in you workplace who require special attention I’m guessing that there are some office dynamics that you don’t understand and would benefit from studying.

There will still be some questions and requests that you can’t deal with in as timely a manner as you’d like. Maybe you’re tied up in a meeting and have to consult with someone else or crunch some numbers before you can provide an answer. If that’s the case, at least reply and let the sender know that you’re working on their request. That way you let them now they’re not being ignored and you can save yourself from dangerous hard feelings. I once put in a request with one of our software developers to see if he could help my group by developing an application to track attendance in our classes. By the time I heard back from him six months later we had already researched and bought software from an outside company. I guess I did get a response, but it wasn’t helpful or timely. I had to wonder if he’d been thinking about the issue all this time or if he was just six months behind in reading his email.

The most important thing you can do when answering email in a timely manner is to ask yourself when your recipient needs or expects a response and try to fulfill their expectation. Of course, some people believe that all of their emails are mission critical-- you’ll have to figure out how to deal with them yourself. Personally, I tend to ignore those people as long as I can. But I’m a bit of a jerk.

Don’t Get Caught in a “Thank You” Feedback Loop

It’s nice to be nice. Except when it’s not. If someone is able to answer a question for you, does you a big favor or sends some juicy gossip your way by all means send them a quick thank you. But that’s where it should end. Don’t keep volleying “thank you”s and “no, thank you”s back and forth in an endless game of mutual appreciation. It’s nice to say “thank you.” But saying it once is enough.

Don’t Reply to a Message with Many Recipients Unless a Reply is Clearly Expected or You Have Something to Contribute

Some messages to large groups of people require a response from everyone. “Please let me know if Wednesday or Thursday works better for you,” for example. Others are clearly fishing expeditions for information and don’t require a response from all the people on the distribution list. “Has anyone seen my red stapler?” would be such a message. But there are some people out there who don’t seem to understand the difference and will reply to every single email they receive. I’m talking about the people who get a broadcast email that was sent to large number of people with a question like “does anyone know a good divorce lawyer in Las Vegas?” and feel obligated to hit Reply to All and respond with an answer like “No.” Maybe they do this to make themselves feel relevant or useful, but there’s no excuse for generating meaningless email. These people are one of the reasons why our email inboxes are full of junk and why so many of us have a hard time focusing on the messages that really are important. They must be stopped.

The first step in making sure you don’t commit such crimes is to take a second to think about whether a reply is really expected. If a message is addressed just to you it’s likely that you’re expected to respond. And of course you need to reply when someone directs a question at you personally. But the more people who are on the distribution list the less likely it is that you’re required to chime in or do anything. When you do have something to contribute the best approach is often to simply reply to the sender of the original message rather than inundating an entire group with information they don’t need. The organizer of a meeting may need to know that you aren’t available on Thursday because you’re going to your chiropractor, but everyone on the attendee list doesn’t. And it’s almost never a good idea to use Reply to All when you change the topic of discussion-- especially when you change it to something personal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Listserve discussions go bad when one person sends out a perfectly businesslike question to a large group of people and one of them replies to everyone with something like “Hi, how have you been? I haven’t talked to you since your husband left and you went into rehab! Did you run into Britney there?” Distribution lists and Listserves make the Reply to All button especially dangerous because it’s easy to forget how many people are included in them.

Make More Than One Draft of Important Messages

None of us get everything right on the first try. Not even attorneys.

Chances are pretty good that you learned to make more than one draft of writing assignments in high school. Why wouldn’t you make at least as much effort with your email messages when your dignity, reputation or career might depend on it? Give yourself enough time to write more than one draft of important messages and set them aside for a while if you can before sending them. Editing your own writing is always more effective if you can take a little break before evaluating it. Even better, get a trusted friend or colleague to proofread critical messages for errors and to make sure that your tone is appropriate. It can be very difficult for us to hear how our tone might be interpreted by others, so borrowing someone else’s ear can be incredibly useful.

Understand That You Have No Control Over Your Email Once It’s Been Sent

I’ve already covered a lot of the scary reasons why you need to understand the fact that you have no control over your email once it’s been sent, but this seems like a good time to gather up a bunch of them in one place. What kind of trouble can your email create after you hit the “Send” button and think that you’re done with it?:

It can be forwarded along in an endless chain to anyone in the Universe who has an email account. Some clever person can forward it to your boss, to your boss’s boss, to your boss’s boss’s boss. It can wind up in the hands of your ex-husband, your priest, or the girl who beat you in the 8th grade student body president election. It might be of interest to the Securities and Exchange Commission or amusing to any number of strangers who simply enjoy laughing at you.

Your message can be permanently posted someplace such as the blogs and websites where you can find copies of the angry associate’s goodbye message or the fight between the two secretaries over the makings of the ham sandwich. If you think that the fast-paced nature of the web means that these things disappear quickly, you’re wrong. Many websites are still available even when they’ve been shut down or altered. Still not convinced? Check out the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org), which keeps an archive of websites just the way they looked in the distant past-- 2001 for example. Go ahead and take a look at an old version of your company’s website. You’re bound to find something embarrassing there. Web design sure seems to age quickly!

Anyone with a copy of your email can edit it and forward it along to someone else as your original text. While there are methods intended to thwart this kind of tampering, it’s generally quite easy for someone to create a forgery out of your email if they are really determined to mess with you. Really, the best thing is to avoid making enemies in the first place. But if that’s already a forgone conclusion, try not to send those people anything that would tempt them to make a tiny little change that could make you look really, really bad. By the way, I don’t feel guilty about editing someone else’s message if I’m going to forward it along if doing so cleans up errors in the original message or removes sensitive information that other people don’t need to know. But it’s always a good idea to ask permission before forwarding anyone else’s message. You can never be completely sure what’s sensitive and what isn’t.

Think Of Your Email as Eternal

While they aren’t usually as romantic, email messages, like diamonds, are forever. Of course you wouldn’t think so from the way they are hastily composed, cursorily read and quickly deleted. But the truth is that deleting an email is seldom enough to get rid of it. Chances are that there’s a local copy on the machine of the person who wrote it and another on the computer of anyone else who received it. It may be lurking in the “deleted items” folder of someone who doesn’t know the “deleted items” folder even exists or in that of one of those nuts who use “deleted items” as a filing system. There may be copies of every email you’ve ever sent on the backup tapes your company makes so that your mail system can be restored in case of disaster and copies on the servers of any email service used by you or your correspondents. And those are just the copies that are created automatically. There are people out there like me who keep examples of bad emails so they can write about them and others who will forward them to their friends so they can say “can you believe what an idiot so-and-so is?” and feel superior. These are also the kind of embarrassing emails that get forwarded ad infinitum, posted on blogs and turned into funny news stories. Remember that law firm associate who sent the angry email as he was leaving his firm ("I am no longer comfortable working for a group largely populated by gossips, backstabbers and Napoleonic personalities") and then tried to recall his message once he realized his mistake? He never had a chance of recovering all the copies of his message because it had already been forwarded beyond the reaches of his firm’s email system. You can still find copies online.

It’s not just your dignity that you have to protect. It seems like every week there’s a new story about a company or governmental agency getting in trouble for the way it keeps (or doesn’t) records in its email system. Morgan Stanley was ordered to pay more than $1.5 billion in response to a lawsuit (though this was overturned on appeal) because, despite the fact that it filed an affidavit saying it couldn’t produce subpoenaed documents related to a business deal gone bad, those very documents kept turning up on backup tapes that Morgan Stanley had asserted were lost but kept turning up. Some of them were found in a janitor’s closet. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations, which are required by law to maintain archives of all of their email, have found themselves facing investigations for not adequately keeping track of their correspondence. In order to deal with the challenges posed by keeping email records, many companies are struggling to come up with policies covering what messages they keep and how long they keep them. Many organizations are effectively deciding to keep everything despite the fact that it effectively means maintaining an enormous volume of data forever.

My firm has implemented a system where every message older than sixty days is moved from an Outlook user’s inbox and stored in an archiving system where it will presumably be available as long we have electricity to power our computers. And we’re not just talking about client emails. Since there’s no way to know what’s important and what isn’t, we’re saving everything; the emails from mom, the Viagra solicitations, the pictures taken at the alcohol-fueled holiday party. One of our secretaries expressed concern that some of her mail that would be archived might not be business related because she “occasionally” received personal messages at work. “If you don’t want it archived, delete it within 60 days,” I told her. “Otherwise it’s going to be around forever.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it probably would be anyway, and I wasn’t foolish enough to suggest that she not use her work account for personal email. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t think at least twice about what you put in your email at work. In addition to my general warning that you shouldn’t write anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see in email it’s also a good idea not to write anything you wouldn’t want to show up in court. Because your email belongs to your employer and they are responsible for what you write, everything you produce can be subpoenaed.

Besides the threat of the law, you should be very careful about putting down any strong opinions or emotions-- especially if you might ever change your mind. Remember those diaries and love letters you wrote as a teenager? Imagine them being reproduced and distributed to everyone in your high school yearbook. That’s the kind of potential for embarrassment you get with email. The fact that email-- just like your yearbook-- is more or less permanent is also a good reason to take the time to write well and try not to embarrass yourself as much as possible. You can’t go back and do anything about that Flock of Seagulls haircut in your senior picture, but you can make an effort so that your email is as smart and charming as you are.