professional 'ghosting' - is this happening everywhere?

[sparklelala]

I side-stepped into a new area of work a few years ago. Creative industry where people in my role are freelance - but we work collaboratively with various companies and are hired by them on a contract by contract basis.

Lots of people who do the same thing as me have noticed that the levels of emails simply never being replied to, even by people you've previously worked with/had a good professional relationship with, are increasing.

My industry (media) is well-known for being pretty competitive and not the 'nicest' - but it seems to be becoming a real problem. I had a meeting last Friday - all seemed to go well and the 'client' requested follow up information. I sent an email after that and it's been utter tumbleweed since then, not even a 'thanks I'll get to this when I can' response.

This is NOT the first time, and I'd be taking this all personally if others I know weren't also complaining about it! It's making me wonder if something has fundamentally shifted in how we communicate with each other, maybe as a result of homeworking/the pandemic etc?

OP you'd have to post in a creative arts forum for everyone to get what you mean. Im self-employed in a similar field and understand entirely. Most times the client has approached you in the 1st place because they already know what you do and they like your work, its not an 'out of the blue' approach in this field, its due to your reputation for great work. After meeting they request a detailed proposal which you take the time to craft and provide and suddenly yes, tumbleweed. That's after they had been very regularly emailing and phoning you regarding the input they want from you.

I tend to feel once they've got the detailed proposal you've taken the time to craft it's a strong possibilty they'll attempt to reproduce the project themselves/hire someone else, showing them your proposal in 'can you do something like this?' fashion. As you likely know it offen goes very wrong and then they'll try to call on you again in future.

I copyright everything, will only ever provide the 'bare bones' of a proposal as opposed to detailed, and also much prefer to curate my own events as opposed to being hired. For artistes just starting out it's not easy to do that however. But it's best to move towards that eventually (grant funding?) because people arent trustworthy out there, with the bigger (heavily funded!) institutions the absolute worst. They’ll waste your time and rip you off too. The bottom line is they haven't responded to your email because they don't want to.

I’ve noticed this internally not externally and I find it frustrating. I run a large project and take a lot of time to get comms right, make sure everyone is clear on what’s happening and that all are kept up to speed

I never get any acknowledgment… so I’ve no idea if they’re reading stuff or not. They’d complain if I didn’t do it… but no thanks when I do.

externally I almost always get same day replies to everything, even if that’s to say “awesome, got it .. haven’t read it yet but will come back when I do”.

btw when are we going to stop blaming Covid or WFH for everything?? I think it’s just bad manners and also email overload in some cases. For example… we have a floor / office manager who writes about EVERYTHING ten times a day… there’s a mouse, I’ll be wfh tomorrow, we have done visitors coming to office on Friday, printer is broken… yadda yadda… I don’t read hers anymore as most of the I have no need to know!

I received a standard response to an email the other day. It said “we aim to respond to all emails within five working days”. We were shocked and then laughed about it.

@RespiceFinemKarma

I certainly agree that emails provide a paper train of what's been discussed and provides some "ass covering".

But this comes at the cost of speed in getting things done.

@sparklelaladid you ever get a response? In the middle of being professionally ghosted myself. A long standing supportive client of almost 10 years left the company they were at. My call was screened and ignored so about a week later, I dropped a message to ask when their final day was and got a question about how my family was and ‘I will call in the next day or two’ but no call. Thought I would send a nice gift through the post with a handwritten card to thank them for all their custom. Got a picture of it being delivered (someone holding it) but Crickets.