Copied in all emails

[user555999000]

I am a few months into a new job which I really like and the people are great. I am senior management and line manage a team of three.

I have never before in my life been cc’d in so many emails. Not just from my own direct reports, but it is as though everyone across the organisation has a culture of simply cc’ing almost anyone remotely linked to the topic of the email. There is a culture of other senior managers responding almost immediately to many requests, which in my view encourages learned helplessness and more junior colleagues not thinking for themselves.

People reply all constantly, with ‘great’ ‘wonderful’ ‘yes’. I am forever opening emails to waste time on this constant influx.

I can’t filter them to go immediately to subfolders because the people sending them, or the subject titles change so often, and I do need to keep an eye out for important information. My team itself is young, and many of them appear to want hand holding with every single thing they do. I can’t work on my own targets, because I’m constantly inundated with the work of others.

I am known for being efficient, organised and a fixer, and I know from experience, people latch on to this quickly and take advantage. I need to let them find their own way and not catch them all the time, but other senior managers seem to be happy with this culture of cc everyone and ask everyone’s opinion on everything.

Any advice? It is not sustainable. I think I need to simply crack on with my own work and see what happens more when I don’t respond immediately? But mopping up my inbox just to free it of this deluge is a major task every week.

That sounds like a nightmare. Surely you can raise the wasted time and lack of accountability with your own line manager? I’d be very concerned about a culture that encourages such behaviour.

I introduced a “thanks but no thanks “ policy in my previous role simply because I was exhausted by my inbox being cluttered with emails that were simply pointless thank yous. Thanks and an emoji are not required by the emotionally and professionally stable

I’m glad it is not just me feeling like this. My direct line manager also responds to every single thing I send to them. For example, just now, they asked me to deal with something, I told them I would deal with it, and to leave it with me, and I immediately got another thank you from them. It’s ‘nice’ to be thanked so much but I’ve just opened another email to be annoyed that I was ‘thanked’. My old boss would usually have thanked me in my weekly 1:1 when I was meeting them anyway.

Sounds like people need to just learn to use the react thing when you can thumbs up emails. The other option, which is riskier, is putting a rule in your outlook where if you get CCed it goes to a different folder.

I hear you! Same at my place of work. If you use outlook set your inboxes to show in conversation. All responses will then show on that thread in one email chain in the folder that way you can delete the thread all in one go. It can take a bit of getting used to but easy to remove if you hate it.

Oh my gosh you are a genius! I’ve just done this and my nervous system is rejoicing. I’ve never needed to do this before, hence did not know ‘show as conversations’ was a thing. Thank you!

One of my direct reports has (yet again) just started another wishy washy thread asking something they can answer themselves if they really thought about it, and I can just let that conversation fatten up as a single row in my inbox and file it later.

I’ve tried to encourage this by using it a lot. No one is following suit though. Now I’ve resorted to just NOT responding. Desperation.

@user555999000ypu are welcome. It was a game changer for me. The satisfaction deleting a thread of unread emails with 56 in the thread is off the scale You will notice a little arrrow on the left that shows all the actions. It will show if you have responded or forwarded on etc.

Also really useful for shared mailboxes