I’m sure everyone has been in this situation before–your on an email thread (and in these cases usually it’s more than just a few people on the thread) and someone decides that a call needs to be put together and for the next several emails (usually one from each person, at least) it’s folks asking when they are available, who can make it, and those who can’t (and there is always at least 1!) and that leads into a volley of another few emails to talk about the new date and time. By the end your siting on a pile of emails asking yourself how you just lost 10′s of minutes of your life and someone owes that back to you!

These are the times when you wish you could start a snowball fight and start throwing snowball-emails at people asking “WHY WOULD YOU PUT US ALL THROUGH THIS!”. Let’s just look at the practical bits here. (This also assumes that all the people are internal to your organization–unfortunately this back and forth is almost unavoidable when dealing B2B (Business-2-Business) as your not on the same email system and presumably have access to group/individual calendars. )

Where did this behavior come from? Clearly this isn’t a product of the tools available to us in today’s marketplace and pretty much in each and every one of our businesses or organizations. Technology is a fickle thing, and in many ways businesses are forced to keep current, especially when it comes to email, as things like anti-virus, spam, email clients such as Outlook, integrations such as Blackberries and iPhones, these all require businesses to upgrade to take advantage of these features that folks within the business are looking for to make their lives easier.  Email providers or if you have an in-house email server all use technology platforms that allow for group collaboration. This is the staple of the next Web 2.0 movement to make things easier on a business by taking advantage of these technological improvements. In addition to the actual email server/service that is being used, you have a plethora of groupware out there, that you can hook into your business to make your life easier! I look to things like Trungle that allows you to share your calendar and stitch together many different calendars that you use in your life. Also let’s look at things like wiki’s and collaboration sharing tools like Sharepoint, these are all geared towards the philosophy that work should not be done in a silo and that inevitably your work will need input by another person. How do you do that without emailing that entire word document to them? Or emailing them asking for a meeting and what date/times work for them? These are all reasons why there is such a booming industry out there to try and solve these world problems.

But more-so, I would say that these behaviors are nothing more than bad habits that people have picked up over the years which in turn are products of older generations of workers who in their earlier years did not have access to the tools of collaboration. These folks use methods that have worked for them in past decades and decide to use them in today’s day and age, and for the rest of us who have to endure their pain, we almost feel that we need to discriminate against people in business who can’t adopt to newer ways. This isn’t to say that we need to just ditch all the best practices that years of experience can bring to the table–certainly there are plenty of arguments that say over-complication of your process can itself be a negative component to a business culture and disrupt things more than a series of annoying emails–however, there does need to be a balance in terms of sensible technology. And we should all immediately agree that it is NOT sensible in this day and age to schedule by emails!

What should the process look like? I hate to get down in the weeds on this, but seriously it is as if people don’t know the process and etiquette of scheduling a call/meeting internally. Emails are great for collaboration, let me first start off by saying that. Passive methods of direct/spam communication are essential to business these days. But when you get to a point where a call needs to be scheduled, the email should just facilitate the answer to the question “Do we need a call”? If the answer is yes, or remotely yes, then the next thing that should come out is a calendar invite from the facilitator of the call with:

  1. Descriptive Title
  2. Location (Is it a conference call, are folks meeting up in a room)?
  3. Dial-in details (don’t forget the international access numbers!)
  4. Agenda (what are you trying to accomplish and do a sanity check to make sure that you’ve accomplished that at the end of your meeting!)

The facilitator should, as they are adding attendee’s, get a nice pretty graph displayed in their Outlook showing each person’s availability based on their calendar meetings. Assuming that people are keeping their own calendar’s up2date, this should be easy for a facilitator to visually see where the open gaps are and schedule accordingly. This way the email thread stops, and a calendar invite is the next piece of mail that one receives. It is really this easy folks! And yet it doesn’t seem that this fairly plain and seemingly commonsense approach is widely adopted by everyone within an organization.

I attribute part of this to the orientation process within a company. In our employee handbooks, we have sections that go into the weeds on a great many number of useless details, what to wear, how to act and behavior, expectations of the organization to you the newbie. But what it doesn’t go into is expectations on how you will coordinate with others. From my experience it is assumed somehow that you just “know” this–just like it’s assumed now that people know how to use computers, and we’ve all had that boss or co-worker that you think to yourself, “HOW DID THEY GET THEIR JOB!” because they can’t do anything on a computer and for all intents and purposes its just a massive paper weight that brightens the office periodically when the monitor is on and takes up space and keeps your feet warm in the winter time. Businesses need to educate their people not just at orientation, but periodically throughout the year on how the business should operate with day to day tools like email–i.e. appropriate emailing, when to CC, when to drop someone off the CC, when to include your boss or the person you are sending to their boss, etc, as well as how to schedule calls and the process to follow and how to make use of this great thing called Exchange that the company shells out ten’s of thousands of dollars a year on and yet only is used for a fraction of what it is capable of being used for.

The awkward bit here is that there really is no good way to approach a colleague and tell them that their methods are causing pain and that they should do it another way. Unless they report directly to you where you can give them guidance and coaching to make their process more efficient and to your own liking, other folks within the organization are left to their own devices and their own management stepping into the fold and taking corrective action on behavioral issues. This is where I stress that a business needs to tend to it’s own ship in a global way so that it doesn’t seem like anyone is being singled out, but yet the business can quickly re-align itself and in the end be more productive. Nobody wants to waste their time on a useless email thread. Studies have show that if a single email disrupting your thought process can result in up to 23 minutes in lost time as you refocus back to your original task. That’s a HUGE loss for a business! By simply changing process and behavior, and to take corrective actions to make sure that the business as a whole is adopting these standards, you can save yourself and others a huge amount of headaches down the road.