Innovation Science

The E-mail Miscommunication Crisis

BusinessWeek has yet another article on the problems with over-reliance on e-mail for communication. I’ve posted on this before (see here and here). The points made in the BW article aren’t new, but are worth repeating:

“’Business has undervalued the social dimension of communication,”says Diel Goleman….Recent research suggests that the perils of e-mail are greater than many assume. Justin Kruger, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has found that as few as 50% of users grasp the tone or intent of e-mail and that most people vastly overestimate their ability to relay and comprehend messages accurately.

People e-mail each other when they are sitting mere feet from each other. They spend time writing convoluted descriptions when simply talking about the issue would more easily convey relevant information and allow for the brief back-and-forths that quickly illuminate issues and develop new ideas. One company cited in the BW article found that they solved problems quicker when they relied more on face-to-face communication of issues and less on e-mail. A CEO is cited who took action to reduce these e-mail related problems by implementing No E-mail Fridays at work. Interestingly, a Syracuse professor has found that e-mail is most likely to misinterpreted when it “comes from a boss.” I’m not sure why this is, but possibly because e-mails from higher-ups are scrutinized more severely than from others, with hidden meanings and hints at intentions excavated from every sentence.

The article mentions that this misuse of e-mail for communication is more prevalent in business among those in their 20s, presumably because they have grown up with e-mail and text messaging as primary methods of communication. Future young employees will no doubt reject conference rooms and prefer to hold meetings in Second Life or Warcraft: “Meeting tomorrow in Ironforge—don’t forget to bring your gryphon!”

What’s interesting is that the majority of complaints that people have about e-mail are either related to spam or to the overwhelming number of e-mails that they receive. People rarely acknowledge the miscommunication problems that arise from using e-mail rather than phone or face-to-face communication, possibly because one rarely knows when the tone or intent of their e-mails have been misread. Because of the difficulty in identifying and quantifying this problem, solutions to this are not as eagerly sought after as, say, solutions to spam. I have not doubt that businesses would benefit far greater from solutions to this looming e-mail miscommunication crisis than from spambots. The topic of the inadequacy of e-mail as a communication medium is starting to become more frequently discussed in the press and the blogosphere, and clearly there are business opportunities for companies to provide solutions to improving e-mail miscommunication—any Web 2.0 companies want to take a crack at it?

E-Mail Etiquette, or an e-Strunk and White

Two recent posts about e-mail are interesting enough to comment on:

LifeHacker talks about research at the University of Chicago that found people overestimate an e-mail recipient's ability to interpret the tone of the message. You've all had the experience of sending an innocently innocuous e-mail, only to find out that it caused a furor when its recipient thought your e-mail was a declaration of your intent for corporate domination, or sending a joking e-mail only to later find out that you now have a death warrant out on you because someone thought your joke was a kamikaze attack on their competence.

I have some experience with this, having directed departments in Colorado and Denmark while based in California, and now interacting with headquarters in Minnesota while based in California. The most important consideration I emphasized when opening a research center in Berkeley for a Minnesota company was communication because I knew that communication can be strenuous when face-to-face is not possible. I found e-mail communcation to be particularly problematic when communicating with Europe because (i) the language difference caused misinterpretation of phrases that would normally be correctly interpreted by a colleague in the US, and (ii) the time difference gives European colleagues all day to mull over an e-mail to (mis)interpret it, while the same happens with e-mails that received from Europe. This was particularly problematic given that the R&D departments on the two different continents were reconciling a merge and trying to redefine their own roles and responsibilities.

A second recent interesting post on e-mail social protocols is from Guy Kawasaki, startup guru in the Bay Area. Guy gives a list of 12 tips for effective e-mails. Some of them are pretty basic for anyone with a modicum of internet savy (#3: Don’t write in ALL CAPS), but one of them I actually mentioned in a phone conference today to my MN colleagues (without yet seeing Guy’s recommendations): #2: Limit your recipients. This last one is something I realized a long time ago: the more recipients that you include in an e-mail, the less likely that anyone will respond. Presumably, increasing the number of recipients increases any recipient's assumption that someone else will respond, so each is less likely to respond themselves. If I really want a response to something, I will send the e-mail to only *one* person even if more than one person is appropriate. Occasionally I’ll send the e-mail separately to several recipients so each will only see themselves as the recipient and be more likely to respond. Guy incitefully likens this group recipient mentality to the bystander effect (although this gives too much credit to those who simply are terrible at replying to e-mails). Guy’s other advice is worthwhile and jibes with my experience, so check it out.

One final note on e-mail: I’ve found that the younger a person is, the more likely they are to use e-mail over all other modes of communication. My own rule is face-to-face first, then phone, then e-mail, then telegraph, then gossip, then leaving secret notes in the knothole of an oak tree in front of Boo Radley place. Efficient dialogue, follow-up responses, nuances and basic communication forms become less effective as you move down my communication mode list, yet many people appear to rather have their hand nailed to their mouse than pick up a phone or walk down the hall to talk.