Are colleagues taking longer to reply / not replying to work emails now?

[JoyousOpalLemur]

Are people responding less to work emails now, or is it just me?

I've been in various jobs for more than a quarter of a century and started noticing pre Covid that some people took ages to respond to emails, or didn't respond at all. I initially thought it was just them, either they're poor at emailing or poor at work generally.

But since Covid, this has massively ramped up.

I've wondered if it's maybe me but I'm regularly cc'ed in group emails that start 'John, have you had a chance to deal with this email..'. I've wondered if it's younger people joining the workforce and coming from a WhatsApp culture rather than an email one, in which you either respond immediately or never, but there are several people in their 30s, 40s and 50s also doing this (although probably the majority are in their 20s and early 30s).

All the emails I'm referring to will require some sort of action. For some, it's just a simple not-that-important yes, no or will find that out for you, for a client, but not responding will be seen as rude, others it's essential for the business that something is done.

Is this a thing you've noticed or is it just me?

I treat email like a post tray, I action it according to my priority order

The last thing I want is my inbox cluttered with thousands of acknowledgments.

I would just ignore a request like that. If you haven't had a bounce back then you can assume I have received it.

I used to advised clients to look at emails twice per day, anything which can be answered immediately, e.g. Google it, check the company intranet, done immediately to get rid of it. Anything high priority, then anything else, which will either require further action, or input from someone else. Obviously not of of these will me need action that day, but should be listed or put in a folder for further action.

Glad I don't work with you then.

Only someone with an attitude problem refuses to reply to emails even when requested to just spend a second giving a thumbs-up emoji.

People forget to put their out of office on when they're on leave or they've gone off sick and could be days or weeks before it's put on their out of office. Or they just could be getting them and don't give a shit so don't even bother to read.

If you work somewhere where your input is not important, good for you. I work somewhere where we're dealing with safeguarding and public protection. People ignoring those emails are going to have a difficult time explaining to a public inquiry 'oh I got it, just didn't reply because I can't be bothered. Oh they asked for me to confirm? yeah I just ignored that, they should just assume I got it'.

All the 'I get so many emails, I can't....' Well then you're not doing your job properly. Everyones busy love, you're not special, get over yourself.

I work in a highly professional role.
Thumbs up emojis are for children

This is very old fashioned. No one sends internal emails these days in my business. We use slack channels and so have high visibility of everything going on across departments so anyone can search and learn and be super responsive.

Yes, I've noticed this and it drives me crazy! I'm self employed and work with a lot of different corporate clients. A lot of them will email me to book me in, but then half the time they don't reply to my questions clarifying exact details so I can get myself organised for the job - even as basic as what time and place do they need me to turn up. And because so many wfh now it makes it harder for me to chase via a quick phone call. I don't want to go down the route of saying "you're not booked in until I have xyz details" because I would lose about 50% of my work, so I end up chasing them several times until I eventually get a response, usually right at the last minute when it eventually dawns on them I'm not a mind reader. This week's example was Sunday evening I finally got a response telling me what time I was needed on the Monday. It's very frustrating and unprofessional.

I also ignore performative emails - the ones where you are cc’ed into to a long trail of reply-all emails so that someone, somewhere, can prove to what feels like the whole company, that they are doing a task. Paper trails have a lot to answer for. The amount of emails I am copied into that I have nothing to do with other than minuted a meeting that generated an action for someone else to do makes me want to scream.

Oh gosh no. Emails do not require an acknowledgement. Yes, they should get a response if there is, for example, a question to answer or an action that you need to confirm has been completed. But it is not necessary to respond with “thanks”. No-one wants 100 emails in their inbox just because every email they’ve sent has been responded to with “thanks.”

OP do you think your work comms culture has changed and you haven’t noticed? Are you sure colleagues aren’t using teams or slack to communicate instead?

Also you might want to review the length and depth of information in your emails. Are they comparable to colleagues emails?

If people aren’t responding it could be because your emails are increasing others cognitive load and might need to be broken down or be a meeting or a form with automated options or other form of communication.

I think fewer people are sending emails by default these days. Maybe you’re hanging onto a previous culture and your colleagues have moved on?

I think that most people are swamped with communication and messaging from all sides and at all times. Difficult to sift through what needs action and what doesn't and when. Obviously people should but it is difficult. I have started to put 'action required' in email subject lines, or make subject lines very clearly describe what's in the email, like 'please send the Krumplstanz report by end of day' or whatever.

I used to be incredibly diligent with my emails. But then I wanted to get promoted and started doing a lot of personal development and realised a lot of my activities had been low value busy work so I’ve reduced this and concentrated on higher value and impact tasks which are central to my role and outcomes .

As a result I choose what to engage with, I’m not rude about it though and I’ll respond if personally addressed but not necessarily engage in what I’m being asked if not a priority. Usually it gets resolved by someone else more appropriate if you delay response. Previously I was aways the first to respond and be helpful .. then I noticed a lot of men holding back. So I did the same!

As a result I’ve got much further in my career as I’m able to demonstrate high value and impact. I have doubled my salary in 8 years. If I had kept up the same behaviours I would have been stuck doing busy work and probably be earning £3-4k more max!

There are a LOT of podcasts out there advising about all of this. A lot of savvy folk have cottoned onto how to manage and develop your career and not just do your job.

It's certainly possible that the culture is more Teams based but I don't think that's the core problem.

For example, an important client emailed me last week asking for their account manager to discuss increasing their contract with us.

This is extremely important because we're struggling at the moment.

They emailed me because they don't even know who the person managing their account is, because the comms have been so poor.

I forwarded it to the account manager (mid 20s) and her boss (late 40s), so that either of them could immediately contact this guy.

One week on and neither of them have responded to my email or contacted him.

It's not that their too busy, it just feels like they view emails as being irrelevant. But the enquiry came via email. The job also requires having a searchable trail so we know what's going on, which is far easier to manager on email than it is via instant messaging like Teams or Slack. Plus, all our clients primarily use email and are often sending us large attachments, which is always easier to manage via email than ie Teams.

I still receive a lot of emails, I ignore the vast majority of them. Sometimes I get chased but a lot of the time if you ignore a request it does just disappear. For me, myself and my personal life are far more important than anything that happens at work.

That’s bad, do you have expected response times for client emails? I’d be escalating this because it could lose your company business. Go higher up. They need a wake up call. This is an example of poor prioritisation. If I was a senior leader I would want to know about poor client care

Exactly .. but .. even though it's a very large company, I only have two bosses, my boss and boss's boss (the CEO, who I've never spoken to).

My boss is just as bad at responding to emails as everyone else. I wonder even if she has set the tone.

I think email culture has changed. We use email for ‘you need to know this’ and anything that requires direct action from someone is Slacked

In my experience yes. Emails are for questions that do not require an urgent response. Add to that that a lot of people's inboxes are a train wreck due to mailing lists, company-wide spams, people using reply-to-all on threads that you have no interest in. We are a 20kk headcount global company and we get idiots sending emails to company-wide mailing lists saying that someone has left their lights on in the carpark, which turns out to be in the Houston office, although obviously that isn't specified in the initial email and requires multiple other idiots hitting reply-to-all to ask which office do they mean. So yeah, I mostly ignore email.

Everyone I work with knows that if they want a timely response from me they should ping me on slack.

In this scenario at my work place I would expect you to post the email to the relevant slack channel (and forward it as well).

Majority of the emails I receive nowadays are not important, CCs and so on. I don't read emails instantly because of that.

If someone reads an email and triage is at important, it's expected they will flag it as so, not just forward without a word.
Putting it to the slack channel allows micro reactions and coordination- tagging people, people reacting that they saw it, agreeing who is looking into it now.
And it is more visible and transparent than email chains which always have someone missing or extra and risk replying the customer with work in progress.

This is my approach

If you email me, I'll reply within 48 hours (unless you are someone important)
Teams messages,i normally respond withn a couple of hours (again, unless you are someone important)
Phone calls and face to face are immediate attention

Anyone that calls for something stupid is instructed to teams me.

I had to put this in place because I was overwhelmed by ridiculous requests that drained my time and pulled me away from business critical tasks
It works well for me

Exactly, and I hate the emojis that Google have introduced-every time you react to an email with a thumbs up it sends another email! Stop doing it, especially when there are lots of people (pointlessly) copied in to an email. I was once on one of those long email chains and every time someone responded about 5 people would “react” with an emoji. It’s so infantile.

Depends on the urgency. I am management in the public sector and get a lot of emails. I tend to go through the ones that done need a response and move them to the relevant folder. I then delete ones that I don’t need. I will go through what is left and if it needs a quick short reply I will do so. Everything else goes on my to do list and I prioritise so although I might receive an email today I might not get to it for several days as I have staff and operational issues that take up large parts of my day.

Absolutely this. So many people seem to think replying to emails is their job. It really isn’t. Email is just a communication tool. And if you spend half your working day replying to emails then that’s half your working day wasted.

That’s what makes me laugh about so many of these WFH threads where people wax lyrical about people “getting away” with “skiving” every day. Being tied to your chair replying to emails isn’t working. It’s busywork. Stepping away from the screen and spending more time on thinking, strategy and prioritisation (not to mention doing the actual job) would be so much more productive and so much more visible.

I’m actually gobsmacked now when rather than dicking about with other slower forms of comms someone (when appropriate obvs) calls me. Or fuck me with a fish fork, gets off their backside and COMES OVER TO TALK TO ME

Caveat of course that sometimes it’s not appropriate/remote working/one needs to cover one’s arse with something in writing.

But very often it’s absolutely possible.

I have rules set up that filter a lot of my emails out, if I’m CC for example then that just files itself away, if someone wants me to do something specific they should send the email to me and state their request clearly, otherwise I assume I’ve just been added so they can say I’ve seen it.

Then everything else I respond to based on whether its
a) important and urgent
b) urgent but not necessarily important - these I will often delegate or push back on that they need to do some of the thinking themselves
c) important but not urgent
d) neither important nor urgent - I get round to these when I can