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?

Definitely not noticed. But have much less emails these days due to instant messaging instead.

This is where AI is proving to be hugely useful for me.

'A world without email' is an excellent read.

How do you know they didn't respond directly to the person, I don't reply to all, if it isn't necessary

Well, I guess some people who are only cced, and therefore clearly only included for info and not expected to respond, might be weird enough to reply with an email which starts, ‘John, have you had a chance to deal with this email..' (see the OP), but I would have thought those people are few and far between 🤣.

We’re discouraged from sending internal emails, i haven’t sent one in a long time and if someone sent me one, they’d be waiting a lot longer than if they just @ me on the chat as I just don’t check them that often.

Teams and group chats do not enable long chunks of focus, unless you also ignore those. You just ignore emails because you can and do ignore emails.

I had my first meeting at 7am yesterday, took 15mins at 12noon for a bio break and to collect my sandwich, was back in meetings until 5pm. I then had to collect kids from childcare, feed them, put them to bed. Started reading emails from the day at 8:30pm, and doing some work. I didn’t read through all the mails as I had received >100 in the day, and I certainly didn’t reply to all of them. While not ideal, only way to manage is to have a scan and prioritise on the most urgent (based on subject line!)

I say this to highlight that it’s not always because people are lazy. Often we are massively stretched and there simply are not enough hours in the day

No, but I think there are so many other methods now. Teams/slack, WhatsApp etc that I think we are expecting instantaneous replies and being "on" the entire work day and beyond, and quite often the juggle mean that some things are lost or easily forgotten about. I try not to take it personally as it's easily done

I wont give instruction my teams, only email, the teams chat disappears after a while and i have no audit trail of what Ive set out.

I have a colleague who never uses email but will only use teams, it causes a lot of problems.

But you can't "do the job" in a lot of industries these days within reasonable hours.

I’m not sure what’s going on or why, but I definitely notice a big difference compared to 7-8 years ago. I blame it on Covid. I think people’s attitudes and work habits changed drastically since. Of course, it also depends on the type of job you do. My work is heavily tied to email; half of what I do is troubleshooting issues that people report through email, and I always respond right away.

OP, I also don’t really understand why so many people prefer Teams over email. To me, it’s basically the same, except I actually prefer email because our Teams conversations get deleted after a while, and I like having written proof I can refer back to.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of people don’t use the phone anymore. Some don’t even have one, especially those working from home, so you can’t just call to get a quick answer. Everything has slowed down significantly, and the overall quality of service has gone down. I do not think it is younger folks fault though.

Wow I’ve never even heard of slack. I am in a totally different work situation. I work for the local authority into schools. Email is vital for prompt communication. I get children on my case load that I need to go and work with in their school. I need to email the teaching staff working with these children. The teaching staff are usually teaching all day so I know I won’t get a response immediately but hopefully within a couple of days so I can get my sessions started. I also contact parents to talk through what I’m doing. Many work and don’t check personal emails throughout the day so I usually expect a couple of days before they reply. Some are really quick. I often email parents following sessions. Some respond and some don’t. I usually send a summary email at the end of a piece of work to school and parents and mostly get a response fairly quickly. Our main sticking point is when people are off sick and not having an out of office on.

I am part of a team but our team is also part of bigger teams. We get emails from corporate, from other departments and from the wider team our team is part of. Email is the primary communication method. I usually know that my immediate team emails usually require immediate reading. Wider corporate emails do get left as they are usually just for info or putting dates into our diaries.

Teams is hit n miss. Some people never check their teams channels. Others use it for quick immediate chats. Mostly used for virtual meetings. But generally the messaging part is within the immediate team.

I don’t get masses of emails a day thankfully. If I’m in a school for a full day then they might not answered until I can sit down at my laptop and go through properly but I usually have some time each day. I also have some purely admin days and some days which are 3 hour meetings at a time. Emails generally are there to enable me to carry out my job.

i probably do take longer to respond to emails than I used to.

That’s because a) I usually have 6-8 hours of meetings a day, on top of my actual job and b) I get hundreds of teams messages every day. Not all of those need a response, but they do all need to be read, digested and actioned.

I try to check my email 2-3 times a day and flag anything that needs a reply, but I don’t always get a chance to compose a reply for a couple of days.

My job description doesn’t mention emails.

I got an auto reply from a solicitor saying they had so much work they couldn’t read their emails and would get back to me within 3-4 working days. Fine as I’m not a client but a resource. 2 months later it’s still auto responding the same. I can’t imagine clients feel very happy getting that.

In my role I’m contacted by phone, in person, teams and email with tasks that need my attention and it drove me crazy and things got missed. I now always respond with email me or it might get missed.

I can only handle one input these days

I email a few firms which give an auto response along those lines. I can only assume because they had some clients who had unreasonable expectations about response times.

They often respond to me within minutes, and certainly within a day or so. The auto- response is clearly just there to prevent the expectation of instant acknowledgement/reply which would stop them being able to prioritise appropriately and focus when necessary

There've been a couple of people I knew who never replied to emails, despite working in very email-driven bureaucracies.

One was a manager several years pre-Covid. You had to phone him or go to his office if you needed something. I don't know why he didn't do emails -- he also didn't do agendas for team meetings, which dragged on indefinitely. Thankfully, he wasn't my manager.

Another was a manager post-Covid when I met him, though I suspect he was the same before. He was in one of the more creative areas of the organisation and had a freelance/private background, and hadn't been thoroughly institutionalized. He replied irregularly to emails, so you'd need to go to his office or Teams call him. He was focused on his projects and his team's projects rather than administering/organizing things, which role I think a woman in his team tended to take over.

TBH, I think backing off from emails and using more personal methods of communication can be a good career strategy. Senior bosses tend to perceive interpersonal confidence and charisma as the big thing when making job decisions; plus, I think when you've been in the workplace a certain amount of time, you'll inevitably have seen examples of plum positions or contracts going to friends and former colleagues of the big boss. It doesn't happen all the time, but is endemic in some areas.

I'm not a manager and use email as my primary tool of communication. Partly because it's how things work in my organisation, partly because I'm socially awkward, and partly so I leave an immense paper trail of more or less anything I do, to make it hard to pin stuff on the resident freak. Also, it feels impolite to interrupt colleagues with anything less urgent than a total systems collapse or catastrophic flood. I do not need instantaneous feedback. A reply within the week is fine.

In general, I can sometimes wait a few days to a week before hearing back now -- not often, but sometimes. I think that's because the place I work is fairly small by the standards of the industry and there's been a financial squeeze for over a decade. Too much to do, not enough time.

Have been working in the media industry for over 20 years. Now I'm freelance and work with a range of clients. I think people have become much worse in replying to emails overall...

There's also a noticeable difference when clients 'want' something from me imminently, they will respond very quickly. However, if that's not the case it can take ages or they might just NEVER respond, even if it's the case that they'll be wanting my services in the future. I think this is rude, tbh - and I do notice. It's been the case that I've remembered the ignoring of emails in the past, and when they re-approach me, I have to think 'hmmm, do I want to work with this company? Are they reliable/nice to work with?'

It's basic manners and basic courtesy. If you are super-busy, just flag something and respond to it later. A late reply is better than no reply - we'll all been there. But ignoring altogether is just bad manners.

My boss is like this. If I really need a response I WhatsApp him or leave a note on his desk (assuming I can't find him in person).

It’s because a lot of people are disorganised, have poor concentration spans, and prefer to use communication systems that feed them soundbites that they can bat away as quickly as possible. Emails require more focused attention and concentration than other methods of communication and many people approach them on the basis that if nobody chases them up for an answer, they can ignore them and never actually have to make the effort to read them properly at all. Imvho, a growing number of people actually lack the ability to comprehend any written communication that is longer than two or three sentences…

I hadn't thought about it OP but I think you're right that some people now think it's socially acceptable to just not reply to something or even not do something. You could also be right that it's a post-covid thing as it's become expected to have a lot of flexibility when wfh whereas once upon a time I think you were expected to be at your desk 9-5.

I do send internal emails but they are not usually things that require an immediate response. It is so that I have a written record of it. For this reason I ask our engineers to send invoicing requests by email as before things were getting missed and I was being blamed. With an email I canprove what they sent and asked me to do.

But I do thin there are too manyemails sent by people. Although I am on my pc all day the majority of my work is not being on my email. I am entering invoices on costing sheets, provessing time sheets and typing invoices. I check my emails three times a day. If something is urgent, they should telephone. We don't use teams and I don't use Whatsapp for work.