Lately I’m struck by the grandstanding of a co-worker who always includes a long list of email recipients whenever he asks for a status on a project that he wants information about. In other words, instead of just asking for status from the one or two people who are assigned the project, he asks them “in front” of perhaps 5-8 others that are cc’ed on the email.
Is this as rude and childish to you as it is to me?
I’ve been around email for a long, long time. For me, this comes across as a ham-handed way of forcing people to respond because the email is being “witnessed” by a large group of onlookers. It tells me that he is trying to force a response, or to demonstrate something to the onlookers. I can understand the occasional use of this tactic in situations where, say, accountability, or establishing a trail of action, or “cover your ass” is needed. But EVERY DAMN TIME?
Help me out here. This annoys me to no end - I feel like he’s running around the company with a loudspeaker. Is this acceptable email etiquette?
You cow-orker is just plain stupid. People hate getting email that is not directly intended for them. CCing non-involved people is just localized spamming.
Note that you are in no way obligated to reply to all. When you give your cow-orker your status, reply only to him.
Uh… in a word… No. Your co-worker is either (a) an idiot, or (b) a childish idiot trying to make a “name” for himself.
Is this person in a position such that you can ask him to stop? I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re one of the people that are supposed to get the email but if you are one of the bystanders getting this in-house spam, perhaps a question to the offender is appropriate. He may just be ignorant of the proper use of email contact lists??
If that doesn’t work and if you have a tight-knit office, it would be cool for everyone who is receiving the spam to respond to his emails by saying, “Thank you for your inquiry. Jane Doe is handling that project. Please direct your inquiry to her directly.” If he got 7-8 of those responses every time he sent out a mass mailing, maybe he would get the hint?
I pretty much know what he’s thinking when he does the “cc lots of people” thing. He’s thinking “OK - I’m putting the 1 or 2 direct email recipients on stage in front of the rest of the cc recipients, so now they gotta answer to me, and they gotta do it ASAP, or else these other cc folks will see that they aren’t doing what I ask them to do. They are my enforcers.”.
Or something along those lines.
I also gotta think that at least some of the cc recipients who have half a brain are looking at this and asking themselves “what a goof he is” because it’s such a thinly-veiled email tactic.
OK, we are assuming the worst, though frankly that is most likely. It is also possible he is trying to build team unity by keeping everyone abreast of what is going on throughout the department. It should be pretty easy to see if this is what he is going for by how the emails are worded though.
In my experience, someone who cc:'s a whole list of people is playing Cover My Ass. That way, if something goes wrong, he’s not responsible, you are—and everyone else is a witness.
In agreement with ftg, just delete the extraneous addresses and reply only to the people you feel are relevant. If the other people want to know, they can ask you themselves.
Perhaps this tactic will have the side effect of causing the people who he cc’s to complain about being in on the one-sided conversation.
This is perhaps more a matter of opinion than fact. I’ll move this to IMHO.
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I’m guilty. I do it because I have a (work related) conflict with a co-worker of mine and my supervisor and her supervisor have to referee sometimes. Without their help, I would quit, and they don’t want me to do that. When things get testy, I start cc:ing people on everything. I print copies for my files, too.
Well, cc can make perfect sense if the people cc’d need to know what’s happened, but not to act on it. I’m guessing he’s just being an asshole here, but it doesn’t mean cc is bad.
How about some office policy where cc is used only for people who don’t need to take action, and then everyone can filter anything cc’d to them straight into a ‘just in case’ folder to look at if they need.
Here’s another reason: when enough people do this, it dilutes the urgency of real e-mail messages.
At my recently quitted company (yay!), they would send out (Japanese-style) message about company policy, who’s quit and who’s been hired, news, etc.–any damn thing to EVERY employee (1500 or so) in the whole damn company. You just learn to ignore all of them, and once in a while you end up missing something important.
Spam comes in degrees. This dude is semi-spamming you.
It predates e-mail. Back in the 60s, someone wrote about the concept of “copy to-ing,” where people would send out a memo to someone with a copy to a supervisor in order to make the recipient look bad. For example:
About once a week I get company email that was obviously sent to a lot of people – everyone in the company, everyone in our division, or everyone that is affected by whatever the subject is (e.g., benefits, retirement, policy change). One of my coworkers invariably forwards the email to everyone in our group. So we all get two copies. She must believe that she is on some secret company mailing list that includes only those deemed worthy of receiving company announcements.
My manager also likes to forward this type of email to everyone in the group. For some reason, if he forwards it as an attachment, it is always deleted by the firewall software; if he includes it as text, it is always garbled.
Are the 5-8 other people superiors of the 2 completing the project? If not, are they all members of the same team? Maybe your co-worker is under the impression that the 2 have delegated some of the project?
If not, it is improper e-mail etiquette, particularly because it’s just annoying, extraneous static that has nothing to do with you, and your co-worker ought to consider who he’s sending it to before hitting the button. Or, if he’s having a conflict with the two working on the project, he ought to cc his direct report or whoever asked him to do the project, and no one else.
In my office, I get CC’d on a lot of stuff, 90% of which does not impact me at all. I just file it away and forget about it. Of that 90%, over half of it is the sender trying to kiss ass with how much he/she is doing (or appearing to do).
When I send e-mails at work, the people who need to know go in the TO: line, and immediate supervisors get CC’d, per their request.
It seems to me that the more people on the CC line, the louder the sender is yelling from the top of his cubicle “Look how important I am! I need validation!”
I just go ahead and rain on the compulsive CC’ers parade by not Replying to All. If anybody asks I just tell them that it didn’t concern those people and I didn’t want to spam their inboxes. Seems to work.
If somebody sends to: Fred and cc’s: A whole bunch of people, with the intent of letting that WBOP know when Fred does or doesn’t reply, he’s forgetting that unless Fred uses a Reply All, the WBOP won’t see Fred’s reply.
I bet this person doesn’t trim his email tree, either, and instead keeps re-replying and re-forwarding the Accumulated Email from Hell.