AIBU to think this is a normal and acceptable email policy?

[SamSamT]

Hi all,

I was conducting induction for some new starters at work this week; and yesterday we went over some minor policies. One of them being our email policy.

Just for context; we are a medium sized business. Standard office environment with your standard business hours. Since the pandemic we only need to be in the office 2 days a week; but are expected to be available/contactable Mon-Fri during business hours.

Our email policy is basically:

• You can send emails whenever you want. You’re encouraged to use schedule send it outside of business hours but not a problem if you don’t.
• The quickest you can expect someone to read an email you send is by the end of the day. On the flip side you are expected to at least read anything in your inbox before you finish for the day.
• If you need to let someone know something before the end of the day, you need to ring or go see them.
• The quickest you can expect someone to reply to an email is 24hrs (not including weekends). On the flip side, you should always try to reply to emails within 24 hours even if it’s a quick “Got your email, I’ll get the info to you by xxx”
• If you need a reply off someone in less than 24hrs you need to ring them or go see them.
• There is no expectation to read emails out of office hours. Emails sent out for office hours will be considered to have been sent at 8am the following business day for the purposes of read and reply times.

We formalised the policy about 4/5 years ago, as we found expectations varied between managers.

Several of the new starters felt it was a bit invasive they could be receiving emails outside of business hours even if they didn’t have to read them until the end of the next business day. A few of the new starters also thought the expectation to have read all your emails before you sign off was a asking a bit much.

Genuinely interested in your thoughts and to see if we’ve somehow veered off from the corporate norm?

Thanks!

That is ridiculous. I work for a global company. The work we do is 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I may send an email UK time that goes to Australia or the US, and vice versa. Those emails are opened when the person is next at work, not in their own leisure time. There is no such thing as “office hours”. Office hours in what country?We may work Saturdays or Sundays or bank holidays as part of our normal office hours. We may work 4pm till midnight, or 6am till 2pm. All are normal “office” hours.

The reason we have a “read by end of the day” policy is because we do occasionally have changes to business that will affect the next day. If the change affects the current working day it’ll be phone calls instead. This happens maybe once a month due to the nature of the business.

it sounds like the business needs to properly think through how they manage this stuff then.

How much of it is genuinely necessary and unforeseeable last minute changes, and how much is simply inadequate systems, processes and management.

Is a late afternoon all colleagues email
the best way to handle this stuff?

Tbh, it’s sounding like a worse and worse workplace with each update.

In my busiest periods I am dealing with hundreds of emails a day

Your policy would have me running to the hills, it is overbearing and micro managed to the extreme.

I don't understand the outrage from people who believe it is so unreasonable for others to email them outside of their work hours (and 'impose' on them and their family life in such a way, despite being clear that no response or action is required until their own working day). You might not wish to be 'imposed' on (even though there is no imposition at all if you simply don't open the email or you switch off notifications), and yet you want to impose your own working hours and practices/preferences on others, by saying they are not allowed to work if you are not. It's a bit hypocritical is it not? Can we not all work according to our own needs and preferences and respect the rights of others to do the same?

The organisation I work for is global and large and people work very flexibly with different working patterns. It is utterly ludicrous to suggest that someone is being rude and unprofessional if they send me an email during their flexible working day but outside of mine. Flexibility is how we retain our staff. It would be very odd and self-absorbed to expect everybody to abide by my schedule.

It's odd how even the most basic threads on mn turn into arguments, which each side having to take more and more extreme views.

For me, the OOH emails thing is not so cut and dried as to worthy of disciplinary if you do, or as simple as ignore if you don't.

There are a number of jobs where OOH emails are appropriate when needed. IT, for example, often involves work OOH because that's when the downtime can be tolerated. Checking emails to be sure when it's started, to confirm you might have done your bit or to check all is complete tends to be useful.

Having your inbox filled with manager emails asking for x, y or z can be stressful, even if they are just sent at that time because the sendor was busy all day. You see them because you're checking on the IT work. You have the choice to ignore them, of course but for many people they play on your mind anyway. There is a mental impact of seeing them come through. Often you cannot unsee a subject line, for instance, and this could make you worry.

For that reason, as a manager, I try very hard not to send emails out of hours. I neither want to set the expectation that OOH work is required to progress or the expectation that I expect any kind of response OOH and certainly don't want to stress anyone out. I've also always been very grateful for managers that do the same.

I don't get it either, in wondering whether these people have never worked in an office.

I don't get it either. I really don't. I can't imagine ever having the capacity to be so horrified at receiving... Dun dun Dunnnnnnn AN EMAIL when I'm under no obligation to reply to it until I'm back in work.

If you don't have the ability to do something as simple as switch off your notifications or just not open the email then that's on you.

Emails are like letters. Can be sent and received at any time, to be dealt with when convenient to the recipient. In this case, when they are next at work. So your new starters are being unreasonable in this respect.

To require people to respond to emails within 24 hours or read them by the end of day is unreasonable. Whether that's possible depends hugely on how many emails they receive and what other work they have to do and the priority of that. I would expect a business to want staff to prioritise by urgency and importance, not by date of receipt of an email (obviously customer correspondence might have an SLA but even that's not usually 24hrs!).

As PPs have said the policy is also a bit micro-managed.

The arguing on this thread about what’s reasonable is starting to make me think that the OP’s written email policy isn’t so bonkers after all.

@SamSamT back to the original question, is it unreasonable? It looks like people don’t like it- maybe you could have doodle poll to check in with everyone to see if they still like it within your company? If they don’t, you could have a nice co-creation session with a mixed group of managers and other staff to come up with something that might work better, then have a follow up session? Maybe that’s too much but would it be a good way of ensuring people don’t feel like minions and it would create buy in for the new policy. If they create it themselves, they are more likely to like it and abide by it.
Bottom line, if more than one person has said they don’t like it, and if you want to keep your people happy, looking at the policy again might be an easy way to signal it’s a team environment not a dictatorship. Email policy is genuinely really important because email has the potential to take up lots of your team’s time, I suggest getting it as right as possible is worth the effort- but outsource the effort, don’t leave it to one or two people.

It’s utterly reasonable, I don’t see any problems with it. Adults do need guidance on what is expected- TRUST ME.

One additional thing we do in addition is to suggest FYI or FOR ACTION in the subject where appropriate, and URGENT/ NOT URGENT at the start where appropriate.

Depends on the job surely? I often get emails out of hours but they're from customers, or a department that works later than I do who has copied me into an email to a customer

Blimey I couldn’t work for a company who micromanage to this extent. Our email policy is fairly simple, we can’t use our company email address for personal business, have to set an out of office for any annual leave and don’t use reply to all unless absolutely necessary.

Apart from that we are free to make our own judgment on how to deal with our inboxes.

The first point seems to contradict itself - the quickest you can expect someone to read your email is by the end of the day but conversely you have to read all your emails by the end of the day?

What if someone sends you a huge complicated email at 4.58 and you finish at 5? Or if you're in meetings all day- what actual use is it to then have to stay an extra hour in work reading all your emails when there is no expectation to act on them, so you will just forget it overnight and have to re read tomorrow when you reply anyway.

I would personally remove all references detailing when someone needs to read an email by and focus it solely on timescales for acting on/replying to emails. And change "end of the day" to "within 24 hours" -otherwise its not fair that someone could make the effort to send an email ASAP at 8am to get it sorted whereas someone else could leave it until 4pm and the receiver would be expected to answer both by 5pm.

End of the day is also no use when people don't all work the same hours.

The issue with receiving emails outside of work time is a non starter though as long as there's no expectation they will act on them - just tell them to not check their computer/phone if it bothers them that much!

Also agree its an unnecessarily complicated policy- ours is basically all emails should be acknowledged within 3 working days if possible, if you want something done faster ring or teams message the person!

It seems very sensible to me and sets out expectations. I like the way it makes it clear that you shouldn’t expect an immediate answer to an email. 24 hours might be tight if it’s a complex issue but the suggestion of a holding message is sensible.

The policy is common sense and sets out good practice. It’s good that your company sets out clearly and unambiguously the expectations.

Not everyone understands these common sense guidelines ( my undergrad students don’t for a start).

I work for the nhs and my hours are 8-4 for 4 days a week

People send emails 24/7 and they are responded to during my working days/ hours

There's no way I'd want to be micromanaged like this it's ridiculous surely people aren't expected to deal with emails unpaid in their own time that's madness

That is insane. How do people even know they've got a work email unless they working?

At my last office based job, I could never have read every email in my inbox. I was literally cc into numerous emails. I think everytime I closed down my computer for the day, there was around 10 unopened emails. If I stayed behind everyday, it would be an extra half an hour, and I'd still have 10 more unopened emails! Also if I opened one to reply, "Got it thanks, will get back to you tomorrow." I'd forget about it by morning! I prefer to deal with the whole email, before responding. So I disagree with some of your email guidelines, sorry.

To a PP it is a chicken and egg scenario though- Infantalising adults via wordy instruction lists for email usage, just encourages people not to think for themselves and so it gets worse- the reduction in common sense!

I'm the same as PP I don't have time to look at pointless emails that I have been inappropriately CC'd on. The business of the setting I work in is often nothing to with my role so I just glimpse at the title and make that judgement. As I am on my own there is simply not enough working hours to respond to all requests, even urgent ones as I'm my experience these are the Usual Suspects who want me to act retrospectively when they should have planned and been pre-emptive!

The trouble with micromanaging with policies like these is that you're not solving the actual problem. The problem, presumably, is people not responding to emails in a timely manner. The sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach is what a lazy or weak manager does because they don't want to have a difficult conversation with the few people who aren't performing to the required standard.

It's all too common - introducing a uniform because the odd person is too scruffy for example. It's better to actually deal with the problem, that way you don't piss off the majority who behave correctly most of the time.

Reading the replies, it seems the policy (like so many policies) focuses on unnecessary detail and misses the stuff that would help. And actually worsens several issues.

higher level guidance on there being flexibility about when to send but no expectation of immediate reply, general guidelines about response times (that doesn’t require loads of additional ‘sorry, I’ll get back to you later’ emails) and actual principles to minimise unnecessary emails would get useful.

Copying 75 people in to all your emails when you just need one person to do something is irritating. There are better ways to create a record so others can see what’s happening (a teams channel, for example).

Running your business so that last minute all colleagues email about changes that have practical effects on the next day’s activities are rare and exceptional events (rather than once or twice a month) is a better plan than insisting everyone must read their email before finishing just in case the management have sent such an email.

There are simply better ways of operating and crap policies like this are usually a symptom of a wider set of problems.

I've worked at places where 'everybody knows I work all hours because I send emails at 3am' was used as a way to intimidate staff - if she did it, there was no way a mere minion could ever be taken seriously when they said they were tired/stressed/overloaded. And she always said 'well, I don't expect anybody else to work as hard as I do, obviously...but if you're not coping, perhaps you should look at alternative careers as we need people who are fully committed and capable of prioritising their work effectively'.

It also meant that after the 3am one, there would be another at 6.55am following up on it, then by 8am, there would be another saying she'd talk to the recipient when they were in, then by 9.03, a 'so what's the progress on this, then?' And if there wasn't a response, by 9.14am, 'Are you even at work? Are you ill? Can you come to my office immediately?'.

All fully supported by the boss. Because this woman 'worked so hard' we were expected to bow down at her dedication and also breach all rules about breaks, finish times and hours between working days.

Not a healthy place to work.

The next boss introduced an embargo between 7pm and 7am, which was far easier - if it wasn't there by 7pm, it was waiting for you when you got in and no bullying martyrs saying 'but surely you check your emails just before you go to bed? You don't have to do anything, just read them, after all'

I agree.

Micromanaging is awful at the best of times and is usually done by incompetent management rather than incompetent staff.

Not allowing people to use their own initiative and take responsibility under the guise of ‘policies’ will have the outcome of high staff turnover and cause others to take an attitude of doing the least amount of work possible.

i struggle to see where any of the above fits into a corporate organisation.

I presume you mean office based working environment rather than ‘corporate’?