I regularly work with people who are a bit overloaded and whatever I have to tell them usually means more work for them, at least in the sense of reading and email, thinking it over and replying with an opinion. One way they keep their workload saner is to plain simply not replying e-mails.
I noticed that if I put 5 people in the address, and start the email as “Dear All”, the Bystander Effect ensures nobody will answer it.
Directed emails to one person are better. Putting their boss into CC works even better but I consider it a hostile, unfriendly move, I automatically dislike people who do this to me as it sounds like a veiled threat.
It is funny how I think I am an unusually introverted type and yet my see my supposedly more extroverted coworkers rather type 2 pages long email than to walk 10m and discuss it. I think the reason is responsibility. Suppose you are overloaded and cannot do a task that would take 10 hours, so you ask 20 questions which takes only 30 mins and send it in e-mail. To half the company. They will most likely ignore it and thus you have a good excuse. If the boss asks why is it not done you can shift the blame around. I think this is why they do it.
When we wrote letters to regional environment officials, we had two choices. One, to include the boss or not. Two, to mention it to the regional guy or not. We had ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ adressees (and sometimes we even put the letters into wrong envelopes)...
I regularly work with people who are a bit overloaded and whatever I have to tell them usually means more work for them, at least in the sense of reading and email, thinking it over and replying with an opinion. One way they keep their workload saner is to plain simply not replying e-mails.
I noticed that if I put 5 people in the address, and start the email as “Dear All”, the Bystander Effect ensures nobody will answer it.
Directed emails to one person are better. Putting their boss into CC works even better but I consider it a hostile, unfriendly move, I automatically dislike people who do this to me as it sounds like a veiled threat.
It is funny how I think I am an unusually introverted type and yet my see my supposedly more extroverted coworkers rather type 2 pages long email than to walk 10m and discuss it. I think the reason is responsibility. Suppose you are overloaded and cannot do a task that would take 10 hours, so you ask 20 questions which takes only 30 mins and send it in e-mail. To half the company. They will most likely ignore it and thus you have a good excuse. If the boss asks why is it not done you can shift the blame around. I think this is why they do it.
When we wrote letters to regional environment officials, we had two choices. One, to include the boss or not. Two, to mention it to the regional guy or not. We had ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ adressees (and sometimes we even put the letters into wrong envelopes)...