Anti-Patterns for email-centric organizations

Just send an email: it’s the way we do it here.

Anti-patterns are bad practices that despite their negative consequences continue to be applied due to their low cost, ease of use and apparent good fit to solve pressing problems. It is possible to outgrow them by learning that a better (more effective and with less unintended negative consequences) solution exists.

In this book you will find the anti-patterns we have uncovered so far by observing how people communicate within email-centric organizations. Email-centric organizations are those organization where the main — or in the extreme case, the only — form of internal communication relies on email exchange. Email are the only available mechanisms for information dissemination and sharing, for discussion and decision making, for systems and application integration, for getting stuff published on the Web, and also for running and managing critical business tasks and processes.

What would happen if next time you log in, you find out all your email is gone? Email-centric organizations are those which cannot survive after their email server crashes.

Since email is so important, doing it wrong can become a critical productivity killer, an incredible communication bottleneck, and a wasteful distraction for the collective attention span of your organization. Especially when the anti-patterns we feature in the current version of this book are involved:

More anti-patterns are currently being considered for addition:

  • Black Hole
  • Broadcast Unsubscribe
  • Chattymails
  • Cry Wolf!!
  • Friday Evening Mail
  • Mail from the Grave
  • Pre-escalated Reminder
  • Private Side-Mail
  • Redundant Mail-Call-Meet
  • Social Spam
  • Empty Reply
  • Faked Reply
  • FAQ Auto-reply
  • Total Recall
  • Two-step Mail Merge
  • Unwanted Newsletter
  • Neverending Story

Let us know if you recognize some of the anti-patterns and would like to share how they affect your organization and you attempt to deal with them. There are probably many more that we are missing, so do not hesitate to drop us a line if you would like to suggest some other ones.

How do you know you are in an email-centric organization?

To find out, please answer the following questions:

  • To apply for a position, did you have to send them your CV by email?
  • Do you schedule interview slots by sending an email to everyone asking them about their availability?
  • Did you get your job offer by opening an email attachment?
  • Your first day, did you get a new email account as you walked in the office?
  • Do they usually send out a company-wide email to welcome newcomers?
  • Did they deliver your fresh copy of the employee handbook via email?
  • How often people reply to all on your department/company-wide mailing list?
  • To go out for lunch, do you invite your colleagues by email?
  • Do you need to send an email to reserve a meeting room?
  • Are meeting agendas discussed and agreed-upon over email?
  • Do people frantically go through their inboxes during meetings to lookup information?
  • Are meeting minutes shared and approved via email?
  • When a new team or department is created, does it get its own institutional contact email address?
  • Are random news and company-wide decisions broadcast by the boss to everyone at random times?
  • To buy something, do you have to send someone an email with the shopping list?
  • To get a virtual machine up and running, do you have to send the specs by email?
  • To update something published on a website, do you have to send an email with the corrections?
  • When they relaunch their corporate website, do they suggest you should send them an email to ask for directions if you get lost in the redesign?
  • To print something, do you have to first send it via email for approval?
  • To print something, after it’s been approved, do you have to send it via email to the print bureau?
  • Do you submit travel authorization requests by email?
  • Do you keep your flight tickets and hotel reservations in your inbox?
  • Do you have to send your presentation slides by email so that they can be displayed on the conference room beamer?
  • Do you approve expense reports by replying to an email?
  • To get fired, do people get the pink slip via email?

If you notice yourself nodding in agreement while answering most of these questions, chances are that you find yourself in a place where email is the main or even the only communication channel.

While of course email is a powerful, cheap and fast communication tool both within and across organizations, most of the previous cases (e.g., booking a room!) are an actual real-life example of what in this book we call “email anti-pattern”.

Keep reading to find out how to do better.

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