I didn’t start working in a professional office setting until around Y2K, at which point email was an integral communications tool. Every day I receive numerous office-wide emails announcing various events, deadlines, and other things.
AIUI, in the days before email became ubiquitous, written communication was done by a memo - typed/printed on a sheet of paper, then copied and distributed to employee’s physical mailboxes. I don’t think I remember ever receiving a hardcopy memo.
For you folks who were on the job before email existed, how many memos a day did you receive?
Maybe a couple a week. Like cell phones, the technology created the meme. After all, compare how many times you’ve seen lately someone at the grocery store debating what to have for dinner compared to before cell phones were invented?
I wrote and received a few memos a week - much of the communication was by phone call or handed down by management.
I was working for a fairly small company at the time when they experienced the advent of email - up until then, nearly all business communication was dictated onto microcassette and given to a typist to produce in draft - corrections would then go back for final typing - writing a letter to someone took several days from dictation to post.
When email came along, it was a total culture shock - people were trying to figure out how we would dictate emails and get the typist to type them for us, and how we would review and correct the typed version, and how it would get sent by the typist on our behalf (of course the answer is: none of the above).
We had physical “mailboxes” - same as we currently have. Items for general distribution would be copied and placed in the mailboxes. That’s where we would also get memos, such as for an incoming phone call that the receptionist handled. There’s be a piece or 2 in the mailbox most days.
But a lot of my work involved the physical handling of paper back and forth: from me to a typist; from the typist back to me; from me to a supervisor; etc. In our shop, you’d generally just walk it to the other person’s desk. Plac it in the “in-box”. Tho there were clerks who made the rounds a couple of times a day. You could place things in your “out-box” with a routing slip attached.
Then we’d go out after work for spicy mastodon ribs! (Man that sounds primitive!)
I didn’t used to get that many Memos per se - maybe one or two a week. Bulk of communication was verbal with handwritten note stuck in mailbox number two on the list.
Memos were generally more for blanket or formal communications.
Memos, company newsletters, etc. yep they were all printed and distributed. I also remember when the team would have large documents to review, they would print a copy and attach a “routing slip”, and the copy was passed around for everyone to review and write comments. Now you can just email everyone a Word doc with “track changes” turned on.
As a low-level enlisted military technical manager (senior NCO in charge of a smallish production team of computer systems folks), I’d write about one memo a week, and read a couple from peer organizations or from on high (from any number of dotted line bosses).
Also, an artifact from that day: the “holey joe” envelope, used to route documents. In my memory, nothing epitomizes bureaucratic workflow in that era better than that envelope.
Back in the days before email, memos were a LOT less frequent because of the distribution hassle. We relied a lot more on just telling each other. We’d save the memos for when we needed to put something “official” into writing, cover our asses, or make an announcement that wasn’t time-sensitive.
When I started my first “real” job in 1989, at a big personal-care products company, we were already ahead of the curve in a couple of ways:
A lot of us were on a computer system, called Metaphor (an early GUI system) that had an email function. We could only email to each other internally (i.e., there was no way to send emails to anyone outside of the company), and only the marketing people were on that email system, but it did facilitate communication. However, anything that was a formal communication would still have been done via a hard-copy memo or report.
We had voicemail, and direct-dial phone numbers, which meant that we weren’t having to have our administrative professionals (i.e., secretaries) take messages for us.
Thinking back, even with those two factors, I’d guess that I was still getting multiple memos / reports / other printed things in my in-box every day – at least three or four a day, and sometimes a lot more. Anything that was coming from a place in the company other than on my floor (i.e., another floor in my building, or another facility) would show up in a reusable inter-departmental mail envelope.
I had an in-box on my desk, and my administrative professional would come by several times a day with new memos, as well as delivering the U.S. mail.
Ohh, yes, I’d have to do this, too. When I’d write a research proposal, my administrative professional would take a hard copy of the proposal, attach a very formal-looking routing / approval slip, and start the routing process, which could take many days. Sometimes, I’d have to hunt down my proposal, find out whose in-box it was stuck in, and badger that person to review it.
We also had routing slips for routing periodicals (such as Advertising Age and Marketing News), which were usually ordered in descending org-chart order. If you were a junior person, you could count on not seeing those until they were weeks old.
Yes, because a lot of the issues that are now handled by email were then handled by phone call or fax or sometimes meetings. Today, I received an email with some scanned documents- before email, that would have been a fax and one or two phone calls. I received three emails in the last 10 minutes which would have been faxes in the old days. My supervisor sent an email to me and my two coworkers - in the old days, he would have had the three of us come to his office to give us the info all at once. I used to get one or two memos a month, twenty phone calls a day and at least 6 short meetings a month. Now I get maybe twenty emails a day ( not counting the ones I am cc’d on), three or four phone calls a day and maybe three meetings a month.
My employer is way behind the times- we didn't get real email until 2005 and we still use those interoffice envelopes.
Not that many intra-office memos, but most business was done over the phone. What we got a lot of were those little pink slips that read “WHILE YOU WERE OUT” at the top. The secretarial people would leave these on our desks to let us know who called while we were gone.
Back in 1979 I was an 18 year-old peon and memos were for more formal communication like things from Personnel (now HR) about benefits and things, or company announcements. Day to day communication was face-to-face since I was a phoneless peon. Sometime in the mid-80’s I’d moved up the ladder a little and was a supervisor with a phone on my desk. Most in-house communication was still in person since our office was small. A call from my manager was more than likely to say, “Come to my office.” Phone calls were more for talking to outside people (on the WATS line if it was long distantce).
We used “dumb” terminals in those days and my first foray into electronic communication was actually instant messaging. I remember going to a blank mainframe screen and typing MESS to bring up a session then typing the user ID of someone also on the system. You could only do this with other people on your mainframe. Then I think we probably had what people here are calling PROFS but at my company it was named something different. You could customize the name of that stuff (what it said on your screen), right?
In 91, I went to work for a very large university department with multiple locations. these locations were spread out across the UT campus. Our super-cheapskate big boss didn’t allow us in purchasing to have a fax machine. The thought was that we would fax our lunch orders instead of taking care of business. This meant that one of us had to trek the 8 blocks in blistering heat once or twice a day to go to the main office to fax things to vendors. and that vendors had to hand deliver their prices every week. We had internal email only up until around 1994 when people started showing up with internet addresses. For awhile we had the unlovely address of @utxdp.dp.utexas.edu. Those were fun days.
Interoffice mail envelopes and pink while you were out slips were our main forms of communication.
At my first job pre-email, I had an “in” and “out” box hanging on my cube, and the mail person would pick up/drop off a few times per day.
Memos were for company-wide communications, which were maybe 3 or 4 a week. Most of the stuff left in my box were documents to review, of which I’d get a couple every day. Group-level communications were handled in the staff meeting. Individual communications were a phone call or tracking the person down.
