Working with someone who emails me CONSTANTLY - tips needed!

[Tinselandlights]

I am working on a small team, all from home at the moment. We have been together for 11 months, all new to the company. I think this is a wfh issue at its heart.

One of the team is incredibly prolific with his work-based email. Never says please or thank you, but he isn't rude per se, just very direct and a bit socially unaware. He isn't bad at his job but is very overwhelmed, partly because he doesn't prioritise. I'm head of my department, he is a similar age but more junior.

At first I dropped hints, then said 'I'm getting too many emails from you, please cut it down' to now, where I've sorted his emails into their own folder to respond to twice a day because there are so many - upwards of 20 a day, so 100+ a week. We have a half-hour team meeting together every day too but he never asks any of his questions then.

I've spoken to his line manager but it doesn't seem to be reducing in volume despite her supporting me and speaking to him. I'm going to speak to her again. How can I stop getting annoyed by it all?

All top tips for not getting irritated by annoying emails gratefully received!

I would not respond in writing anymore unless absolutely necessary. Filter them into a folder and address what needs to be answered in the team meeting each morning. Hopefully he will get the message and be more organised, and if not it doesn't matter as you are not effected anymore. Sounds like he needs some managing up training, if such a think exists.

This weekly meeting, did his LM / head of product development want such a meeting? Is it purely a 'managing difficult colleague by channelling his mad ideas into one easy to suffer session', or is it a meeting his team members actually want or need?

I think you're in danger of re-arranging the whole department's work and donating everyone's time, to pussy-footing around an incorrigibly difficult person. When perhaps his manager should be giving him training, guidance, spelling out expectations, then, if no change, warnings, then managing him out.

Hyper-demanding, difficult employees can consume months of management time and destroy their department's morale, functionality and relationships. Incorrigibly difficult people are just not worth employing.

Get the right people and you can train and develop them. Get the wrong but already skilled people and you cannot change them.

1. Line manager - include in a formal 1-1 that his use of such frequent email is inappropriate. Offer of training included in 1-1 and followed up in personal development review.
2. Make sure your "Rules" are set up so that you don't even have to give any headspace until you are ready.
3. Set up a rule for emails you are CC'd into. An auto reply, "Thank you for copying me in to this communication. If your email requires my response please include me in the "Senders." If not, please do not include me." Make it clear to the team that if you need to be made aware of something, they need to actually do that, not just blindly CC in. I find it's the most abused form of laziness!
4. Auto response to all other emails, "Thank you for your email. I will aim to respond within X working days. For urgent enquiries please contact me directly." He may use this as an excuse, so be prepared. If he calls, persistent repetition is your friend. "Thank you for your call. I am unclear what the urgent matter is?" Repeat!
5. Set aside 5 minutes each day. Create a draft email, address his points but do not send until Monday of the following week unless they actually do need a more urgent response. Seeing so many queries may shock him!
6. Thank you for your feedback.
7. No.
8. Yes/No/one word answer!

I've got a colleague who sends about three hundred Teams messages interspersed with emails when he needs to work with me on something. Drives me insane.

This guy sounds like he doesn't understand the usual protocols OP and needs managing.

@Tinselandlights

The tips have been reallly helpful - I'm trying a variety and have asked him to gather together his mad ideas to a single weekly meeting with others in the company too so they can be discussed rather than just fired out.

That's so odd.

Why not just push it back on his LM as me (& many others) have suggested?

As a LM myself, I'd be annoyed if someone else took over managing my direct report. Unless his LM reports to you? Which makes a difference but still, you should ask LM to address it.

You're actually encouraging his poor & inefficient behaviour by suggesting you share his ideas more widely

I would pick up the phone and ring him every single time a new email arrives for 3 days to answer it in person. State that you prefer phone calls and find lots of little emails hard so are going to attend to them while they are fresh. Fairly sure he won’t enjoy 20-25 calls a day and will suddenly get it. At least I hope he would. Give it a try.

It is quite possible he's just overwhelmed and stressed. That all this message-sending is a superficial 'space clearing' exercise, an effort to clear mental space for himself, so he can concentrate on his real work. Like the way people with exam revision or an essay to do, suddenly get very interested in cleaning. They feel they cannot settle to their main activity until all the smaller jobs they didn't even notice before, are done.

That behaviour is very consistent with depression and anxiety. It's agitation. People can become very reactive, responding reflexively without much thought. It can start as 'space clearing' but become a compulsion, so the distraction activity takes over centre stage.

In that case, he's not even claiming that his own messages are important. He's just firing them off to get them off his own plate, or to act out a 'got to respond to everything, involve myself in everything' compulsion, that's keeping him from engaging him with his proper work (and whatever is scaring him about that).

So, his LM needs to keep him focused. Keep taking him back to his main work and encouraging him to get on with that, step by step if necessary. He might benefit from some help with work-planning, time management, breaking overwhelming tasks down into bite-size chunks with achievable milestones. Tell him not to worry about any of this peripheral stuff, other people have that under control and will seek his input when needed.

By taking his anxiety-induced messages seriously, letting his agitated mind manage you, as well as him, you may not be helping him at all.

lottiegarbanzo those are very interesting and nuanced insights, and they certainly ring true for the multi-messager we had. Have to wonder though, at what point it's all just too high maintenance if he's not a fully functioning adult. Unless he's demonstrably blindingly good at his job, anyway.

Be grateful he's not using teams messaging - dear god that system is annoying. I've managed to mute it now and just check it once a day and things that could have come to me on email I ignore for an additional day, in the hope that in future people will get the hint and use email! I was losing my mind with it pinging all the bloody time.

Nevermind the pinging - the three dots of doom "moving" when someone is typing and it takes them bloody ages to complete and send the message.

Ignore the ones that do not need a reply.

They're always a question. But it's not necessarily something that needs to be asked RIGHT THIS SECOND. So distracting when you're trying to finish a task. I am deliberately answering emails more quickly than teams messages to hope that people get the bloody hint.

You say that you meet him for 30 mins a day? Get his mails sent to a separate folder and only open it in your meeting with him.

You could also tell him to collate the day's emails into a single one of important matters and to send this just before your meeting.

( Explain that he will have to speak to you if anything is more urgent than that.)

If it's the depression talking, agitated racing-mind taking over, it should be a temporary thing. An illness that gets better. He needs routine, exercise, sleep, good food, social contact - which may all have gone haywire with lockdown and home-working. (Maybe medical help too, depending how bad it is).

It may well be that there's something about his 'proper work' that's worrying him, that he feels he can't do well, that he's seeking distraction from. His LM may need to probe that, ask a few questions, hold his hand a bit.

Temporarily unwell is quite different from full-time incorrigibly difficult, which was my other guess.

It's also possible he could be both! Which gets trickier and demands careful management. You don't want to sack someone for being unwell but might for being an intractably bad colleague. Careful management, offers of support, sick leave if needed, all thoroughly documented, so you can demonstrate you've offered him every reasonable chance, before going down a managing out route, if you find you need to do that.

But either way, the thing not to do is dignify his low-priority messages with a serious response. Doing that makes you complicit in his misjudgement. It will make it much harder for you to characterise his behaviour as inappropriate and unwanted, down the line.

@lottiegarbanzo I think you've absolutely nailed the personality type, you sound v clued in on it. He's not bad at his job per se, and the space clearing is exactly what it is.

@EarringsandLipstick I'm not changing my work style to assuage him, but one of the very wise pieces of advice is to push it all back on his line manager which I'll do, but I don't catch up with her until next Wednesday and I only started this thread on Thursday. She totally knows what he is like and should be doing more to manage him.

One of the tricky things is that we all started in lockdown 1 so we've all been working from home which I think means we haven't had the time to build our team relationships.

We have a morning meeting every day but other than that I do get the impression he is lonely working from home.

@Tinselandlights

That makes sense & yes, understand the challenges of wfh relationships! Good luck getting it sorted ☺️

Honestly, your best bet is to accept it happens and treat it like it's inconsequential - based upon my experience of multiple people doing Reply Alls to say that they've done x, then somebody Replies All to say thank you, then the first Replies All to say my pleasure, repeated until I want to take their keyboards away and lock them in a cupboard somewhere I don't necessarily mean the keyboards going into the cupboard, either ad nauseum.

I don't respond to the blatant fishing for approval/to be seen to be doing what is literally their job and always direct my essential responses to the people who actually need to know - who say they prefer that, as it means they know if I email them, it's actually something vaguely important.

We (as a company) have agreed the following:

1. No need to say "Hi john," or whatever at the start of each email,
2. No need to "thank" people when they reply to us.

Cuts down the time taken to email, and also the volume across the company.

We reply in different font in the body of the question, and often use as few words as possible.

The days of an email being "like a business letter" are long gone.

Plus - if you are only on CC list, then just ignore. Sky tends not to fall in.

This smacks of someone who is overwhelmed by their own sense of importance. I’ve just changed teams and there is someone 2 grades junior to me who thinks he is my superior and was constantly sending me emails telling me what to do. I just ignored him and he stopped eventually.

As you’re head of dept, actually I think there’s a bit of an issue if you LM his LM - you need to hold her to account rather than letting her abdicate responsibility . Support and coach her to deal with a tricky employee but stop dealing with the problem yourself - this might be the first time she’s ever dealt with a tricky direct report and it’s always tough no matter how experienced you are.

As for him - go for a straightforward ignore. My manager’s manager doesn’t respond to my emails unless they genuinely require action, and nor should he - he needs to know certain things are happening, but I don’t need to know he’s read it and I certainly wouldn’t go to him with my queries or give him unsolicited feedback. I have certain people at work that I just ignore their emails because they send too many and they’re never interesting/relevant - just someone trying to be visible because they don’t do any actual work or the dreaded “add value”.

I strongly suspect he’s doing this because he thinks he should be in charge - possibly with a healthy pinch of sexism. He may have had a role at your level in the past and is seething at having to accept more junior role for whatever reason. He might have applied for your job and not got it and can’t/won’t get over it. Whatever the reason, it is not your problem but you can be a lot more bloody minded in dealing with it.

Incidentally, I had someone join my last team temporarily who claimed to be lonely working from home. He may well have been, but he also wanted to sap absolutely everyone’s time with crap like a zillion teams messages and expecting everyone to be at his beck and call - he’d teams one of us, then another if he didn’t get an immediate response etc etc, then complain to another that the first person didn’t respond quickly enough, you get the gist. What it really came down to was that he deeply resented being at the bottom of the chain and having an all female management chain. I was team leader, I just ignored him and supported my staff who were directly managing him, and it wasn’t too long before it became sufficiently bad that I terminated him without notice and sent him back to the team we’d borrowed him from (luckily I had that option).