Have you ever had 'cc' in an email used 'against you' at work?

[chomalungma]

Email is great. A valuable business tool. But I do hate it when conversations you have with it suddenly don't become 'private'.

Obviously nothing in email is secret. It's incredibly easy to reply to people, cc a few others into it and before you know it. lots of people can see what's been written. In the 'old days', that wouldn't have happened as much.

As an example, there is something on my 'to do' list - but it is a low priority. The manager who wants me to do the task has emailed me about when it will be done - and 'cc'd' my manager into it. It wouldn't have hurt to simply email me - rather than 'cc' my manager in . I don't have a particularly good relationship with my manager at the moment.

I can think of other 'email' chains - where people have been 'cc'd' in - yet really they don't need to know. Incidents could have been resolved with simple talking to people - or just directly involving people in emails - rather than people just getting one side of a story.

Maybe I am being a bit sensitive - but I do think that sometimes 'cc' in an email chain is used against people.

Oh I can't be doing with this at all, it's so passive aggressive. I always felt that people were trying to get brownie points with me when they copied me in to matters which were being very well dealt with by my team. A simple conversation with the relevant person would have confirmed it instead of wasting peoples time with niggles. If it was something more serious I would expect it to be addressed directly.

When this happens to me I tend to read it like they are a bit annoyed or that they want me to respond urgently.
My job, and the organisation, is quite busy and sometimes I just have to focus on the core/urgent stuff for my role.
I don’t worry too much but I have a supportive manager who also wants me to do the core stuff that she assigns me first so I think that makes a difference.
I usually just note that feathers are ruffled for whatever reason and try and do that task asap, or email back saying why I won’t be doing it

Also set up an email filter for cc emails, which has saved me loads of time, helped me stopped getting bogged down in too many random email trails when trying to find out new tasks or updates on things I have to action urgently

I have on occasion done this when I suspect the proverbial will eventually hit the fan and my role will be questioned. I do it to indicate I've taken all the steps I should have in the timescale required.

Until I read this thread I truly had no idea how paranoid people are about 'cc'. In all the places I have ever worked it was a means of keeping people informed on a need-to-know basis about what was going on.

Lucky you. You've worked with decent people. But people have given examples on this thread about how others have tried to catch them out.

A couple of months ago a group of people in another department decided to have a good bitch via email about our department being 'useless' (I promise we're not really, they just had no idea what our department actually did!). Over time, more and more people got cc'd in to this email exchange until eventually it got to our department manager, who replied to everyone, whilst also cc'ing in our entire department. She was very polite and simply explained why we were not at fault and a few ideas as to how the problem could be resolved. I bet theoriginal email writers were mortified at having their private bitching session broadcast across most of the company though .

I have a colleague who cc-s the director every time she asks me to help her with something. Except that she doesn't have concrete ideas of what she needs, so the cc is like her marking her place "I initiated this project", then leaves all the thinking and doing to me, but wants to take credit.

I'm never sure of how whether to "reply to all" when this happens. It must really piss off our director to see a big trail of emails about something they've delegated.

I do this with a certain member of staff. Theory goes like this:

I send her a report
She consolidates it into a larger report and sends it to senior management before the quarterly deadline

In reality
I send her the report in good time
She chases me for it - I reply "I sent it to you on Monday at 15:14". Rinse and repeat.
She sends an incomplete report to management, copying me in and explaining to senior staff that I should have sent her my report by x
I then forward my original e-mail to her with my report and cc all

No regrets at all

So OP, I used to get annoyed about this but as I have got older and more senior I have realised that it often just a way of getting something out in the open - it helps everyone see what are priorities, helps to identify when someone is under pressure or when there is a point of friction and it can actually avoid misunderstandings and delays. In fact, I specifically ask my team to make these requests shared (we don't use email, but on a shared messaging channel rather than private messages). I need to know what is being asked of my team to preempt resourcing issues. If you are confident that you are doing a good job then you don't have anything to worry about here. It's not being used against you.

@JustaScratch

I agree. I think the people who are objecting to it fall into these categories

1. They don't trust their colleagues and think they are trying to undermine them at work

2. They haven't worked in transparent organisations where tools like this are used to keep from anyone playing games/hiding their incompetence/blaming others for their mistakes

3. They are blaming games and the act of cc'ing exposes them.

Either way, objecting to it, in my book sets off red flags about why your colleagues felt the need to do it and what your delivery /communication was like.

playing the blame game not blaming games !!!

Either way, objecting to it, in my book sets off red flags about why your colleagues felt the need to do it and what your delivery /communication was like

My delivery and communication is good - but I am not really worrying about this other issue as it's relatively easy to deliver, it doesn't need starting properly till January and it needs to be done by April. I have other things to think about.

No, the objection is to people using it for passive aggressive purposes - in an attempt to 'show someone up' rather than just speak to them (or, if necessary, speak to their manager directly).

I used to see it happen when two people had been sniping at each other over a series of messages, then one would get exasperated and cc in the manager, as a PA 'looook, he's picking on me! Tell him off!' plea. The manager unpurprising viewed this as very childish behaviour.

Similarly, in exasperation when someone hadn't delivered as expected. When the 'correct' action would have been either to speak directly to the person and sort it out, or, if really necessary, speak to the manager directly.

@chomalungma just to be clear choma, I wasn't talking about it in relation to your situation specifically. I am just thinking in general how it has been used in places I have worked.

I am sure your judgement is correct as you know the place/situation.

Dh owns the business - he'll cc in everyone for information and he wants to be cc'd in because he wants to know what's going on. I questioned him on whether people would take it the wrong way and he said he didn't run that kind of organisation - if he had a problem with someone he'd deal with it directly rather than playing games.

But I do think a recent exchange with an external supplier was more difficult because dh wanted me to sort a problem out but he wanted to be cc'd in on the communications. I think you have to be alert to differing work cultures between teams and businesses.

Yep been there - somewhere I previously worked had one snakey woman who was friends with one of the directors. She would randomly cc him into emails even when something tiny had happened and it was awful. Everyone hated her, she made enemies out of everyone through it and she was eventually pushed out of the business for her behaviour in general

In places where the culture is to cc for positive reasons, that's fine and not what OP is talking about, as far as I can tell.

Happens quite frequently to me. They like to drop all the ccs when it turns out they've made a mistake and have to apologise though.

if you've never had someone use this as a PA way to try to get you into shit with your boss, lucky you.

Lucky me I'm fucking efficient and more than a match for most things like this. I'm also a senior manager so I see a lot of it happening among the staff.

if you are working on a project, meetings are the way to keep people up to date, or weekly/daily/monthly reporting. Not this. I get hundreds and hundreds of mails where I've been ccd on a banal and (to me) completely trivial matter. And so many people "reply to all" with - "thanks"
It drives me bonkers and is a waste of my (very expensive) time

Your bit of the project might not be due until January, OP, but your coworker’s part might need to start now. You don’t know what else she has on her plate by the same token. Same with the buyer I mentioned, her ‘on dock’ date for receiving the products is January, she orders in late October. Great, we have just over 2 months and we need every minute of that time. As soon as we get the order it’s entered in our system so if we have to wait around for 3 days to get the bloody blueprints that’s 3 days late ordering materials some with weeks of lead time to get them to us, then there’s the time taken to programme the part, send the roughed version for outside processing, quality inspect the prototype, make the part, inspect the part again, maybe there’s a requirement for an external inspection, again, we have to book this in advance so what looks like months for you to get your arse in gear means someone else is sitting twiddling their thumbs and has to perhaps rush their role in the end. Get a bloody clue. Sounds to me like you’re alright Jack and fuck everyone else trying to do their job.

Your bit of the project might not be due until January, OP, but your coworker’s part might need to start now

That's when she has asked me to have it done by. It's not a big project. It's just that she thinks it's important.

People at work - especially certain managers - have a habit of asking for me to do stuff without setting deadlines. I have learnt from experience that many of them are last minute deadlines and are things that need doing urgently.

The first thing I always check when someone asks me to do something is when does this need doing by. It allows me to set priorities. It also stops us getting into trouble as an organisation because we forget to do something or are rushing around like blue arsed flies at the last minute.

I have a lot to do - but I know the deadlines and am aware that things can get sprung on me. At the moment, I have a massive project on - so this other one that is not due for a while - and whose deadline I know, is not at the top of my to do list. I am just working on it - but not chasing it up.

A cc is very useful if you're in a Austin situation where someone else keeps taking credit for your work. If you keep others up to date about your progress with some work, it proves it's actually you who's doing the work and not someone else.

Nothing to do with Austin. Weird autocorrect.

Nothing to do with Austin. Weird autocorrect

I was wondering about that