PODCAST - #HRHappyHour 230 - Email Me! Battling Constant Connectivity

HR Happy Hour 230 - Email Me! Battling Constant Connectivity

Recorded Wednesday January 6, 2016

Hosts: Steve Boese, Trish McFarlane

Listen HERE

This week on the show Steve and Trish recorded the first HR Happy Hour Show of 2016 by chatting about email and the impact of connectivity on multiple platforms.   We somehow get derailed a little bit and end up hearing what Steve plans to do before conference season starts.  Hint....it has to do with facial hair!

We wind talking about not making predictions about the HCM industry.  Instead, we cover what should HR leaders be talking about in 2016.  From intelligent technology, the world of benefits, to the importance of the employee experience, we cover it all.  Please listen in and then weigh in on what you think is important for the upcoming year.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below, (Email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

And of course you can listen to and subscribe to the HR Happy Hour Show on iTunes, or via your favorite podcast app. Just search for 'HR Happy Hour' to download and subscribe to the show and you will never miss a new episode.

As much as it pains me to write this, I would rather you send an email

Even though I have a 'hate-hate' relationship with email, as many of us do, I have to make my annual stand/defense/plea for email once again, even in 2016. I touched upon this issue in my 'Ways in which to contact me, ranked' post from late 2014, when I laid out a pretty persuasive argument for what I feel compelled to re-litigate once again in 2016. And that is unless you have some kind of prior understanding, or are corresponding with a close associate or friend that you know really, really well, the default medium for business communication still has to be email.

Hang on, I need a second before continuing with the post. I think I many have threw up in my mouth a little...

Ok, I am better. Here goes the rest of the take.While most of us, especially me, has come to loathe many elements of email, it remains the default communication media for global business. Everyone has email, everyone still uses email in some capacity, everyone in business understands you have to check your email at least daily, if not several times a day. It may be the lowest common denominator for business communication, but it is the common denominator nonetheless.

And that can't be said for the seemingly 293 other ways that we can use, or try to use, to contact one another for business reasons. There are the obvious mechanisms from the popular social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, even Instagram. And then the less obvious ones like SnapChat or Skype. And most of those networks have multiple ways in which they can be used for communication - mentions, messages, private messages, tags, etc. It all adds up to an enormous set of potential 'places' to check for communications. And that is not mentioning old-fashioned phone calls, voice mails (which I hate), and text messages, (which I like). 

Note, this rant is 99% directed at cross-organizational communications, not internal company communications between co-workers that in many cases are moving away from email and into alternate productivity and communication platforms like Slack or HipChat. Those tools may be fantastic at simplifying collaboration and reducing email volume, but they are almost always internal tools. In my role probably 90% of my communication is with people from outside my organization.

So when you send business and otherwise 'important' messages via one of these other media, (and you did not have an agreement or understanding to do that beforehand), you are creating two potential issues. One is that you are making a big assumption about the person you are contacting and their habits and preferences. You might even think that their methods are similar to yours. You may live all day sending Twitter or Facebook messages for work purposes, but that does not necessarily mean that I or anyone else does. I will admit here, I never check Twitter direct messages. I mean never. 

Second, you are making an unfair ask of the person you are contacting via these messages to adapt to your preferred methods of communication. I have a LinkedIn account of course. But I do not want to conduct any meaningful correspondence in LinkedIn's messaging tool. It stinks to use. It is not searchable as far as I can tell. And it does not integrate with anything else. Frankly, it sucks. Just about every LinkedIn message I send says, 'Please send me an email directly on this.' I am not proud of this, but it is just how things have to be.

And a quick disclaimer for folks that know me and might know this: I am not always great at email. In fact, sometimes I am pretty terrible at email. But I am more terrible at the dozen other potential ways that I can be reached, many of which I never or rarely even check. I am looking at you Facebook messages.

Ok, that's the end of the 2016 version of my email/messaging/ways to contact me rant.

I wish things could be different. I do.

But until then, you, me, all of us, we are stuck with email. 

Best of 2015: Poker, dating, and responding to email: It is all about the timing

NOTE: As 2015 winds down, so will 'regular' posts on the blog. For the next two weeks, I will be posting what I thought were the most interesting pieces I published in 2015. These were not necessarily the most popular or most shared, just the ones I think were most representative of the year in HR, HR Tech, workplaces, and basketball. Hope you enjoy looking back on the year and as always, thanks for reading in 2015.

Next up a piece from March, just one in my years-long series of obsessive posts about email, Poker dating, and responding to email: It is all about the timing.

Poker, dating, and email: It is all about the timing

Good poker players will tell you, at least I am pretty sure they will tell you, that no matter if your cards are good, bad, or somewhere in between, that a smart player will respond and react to the betting action in a consistent manner. If you call or raise a bet too quickly or eagerly, that might be a 'tell' that you are holding some great cards and can't wait to get more money into the pot. Similarly, waiting and belaboring a decision to call a bet could signal a comparatively weak hand, and embolden your opponents.

So the smart play is to find and maintain a consistent rhythm or cadence to your reactions and decisions, good cards or bad, and eliminate at least one source of intelligence for the other players. Don't get too twitchy, don;t wait too long to move, and you maintain some control of both your emotions as well as the table.

I suppose the same argument could be made in dating where guys have, for pretty much forever, had to figure out how quickly to call after an initial meeting and exchange of phone numbers, or a positive first date. Call too soon then you come off too eager and possibly creepy. Wait too long to call back and you might send off a 'I'm not really interested' vibe that inadvertently could short-circuit the relationship from the beginning. So it's a tough call (no pun intended), figuring out the proper 'wait' interval for the call so that you don't screw it up or send the wrong message.

This kind of 'How long do I wait to react?' dilemma pops up in all kinds of workplace situations as well - in when to speak up in meetings, following up after a job interview, and particularly one that stands out for me, the 'How long do I wait to respond to this email?' conundrum.

Here's the scenario I want you to consider. You send an important'ish email to a colleague - maybe your boss or a sales or job prospect, not one of your direct reports, the idea being the person you emailed does not have any kind of 'expected response time' commitment to your emails. But you are eager for a response nonetheless. Then this person sits on your email for a bit. Maybe a day, maybe two, maybe even a week. Again, they don't really 'owe' you a reply in any specific timeframe, but they 'should' get back to you at some point. So a few days pass, let's say about six, then you finally get a reply back to the email that for which you've been eagerly waiting. 

And now the moment of truth, like the poker player having to decide how long to wait before pushing in your chips, you have to determine when to reply to the reply, to the message that you waiting six long days to receive. If you immediately hit back, say within a half hour of getting the message you are sending out a couple of signals that you may not really want to send. First, you come off as a little bit desperate or at least over eager. You waited six days to get a response and you're firing back in almost real-time. You may just be excited, but you also could appear weak. And second, and maybe this is just a hangup I have, you set yourself up as someone who is constantly, perhaps obsessively, monitoring your Inbox. Most productivity folks recommend checking and responding to emails a couple, maybe three times a day. Getting an immediate reply back tells me you never stop looking at your email.

So what is the 'right' or best way to mange this situation? 

Unless the subject matter is really urgent, or has some kind of hard deadline associated with it, I think you have to wait at least half as long to reply back than it took for you to get your original reply. So in our example if it took six days to hear back from your emailer, then you should be able to hold out for a couple, even three days to respond back. Waiting, at least a little, sends a couple of more positive messages. It shows you have other things going on besides waiting for that email. It shows that you took some time to actually think about your reply. And finally, it sort of but not quite evens the power dynamic between you and your correspondent.

So if you want to play the power game at the poker table of in your Inbox, take a little time before you re-raise and before you reply. You don't want to show what you're holding but acting too fast.

And to everyone waiting for an email reply back from me, I promise they are coming soon...

Learn a new word: Face with tears of joy

At the risk of sounding a little too much like the 'get off of my lawn' old codger that I am fighting against becoming, please take a look at the image on the left, your Oxford Dictionaries 'Word of the Year' for 2015 and try hold back your tears for the future of humanity while you contemplate the same.

The 'Word' of the Year for 2015 as you have certainly deduced is not really a word at all, but rather an emoji, and to be precise, it is the 'Face with tears of joy' emoji. And if the folks at Oxford are correct you have doubtless seen this particular emoji plenty of times this year as their research claims 'face with tears of joy' to be the most-used emoji of 2015. I guess 'smiley-face' is just so 2012. Note to self: I probably need to up my emoji game.

Just why did Oxford Dictionaries go with an emoji, never mind this particular one as its Word of the Year? Let's take a look at the reasoning from the blog post announcing the selection:

Emojis (the plural can be either emoji or emojis) have been around since the late 1990s, but 2015 saw their use, and use of the word emoji, increase hugely.

This year Oxford University Press have partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and 😂 was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. SwiftKey identified that 😂 made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014. The word emoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.

Admit it, you have used an emoji(s) in some kind of 'business' correspondence in the last month or so. Even if it was not a full-fledged 'image' emoji, you have definitely dropped a :) (technically, an emoticon, not an emoji, but you get the idea), somewhere in an email or a text to a business contact. It is ok, I have to.

And I suppose with recognition of the rise in popularity and increase in common usage of emojis by organizations like Oxford Dictionaries it is becoming a little less troubling to admit that you have been peppering emails and other messages with those cute little characters. And why not? A picture is worth a thousand words and all that, and NO ONE wants an email of a thousand words, or even half that.

But the larger part of the story, and the reason why I have submitted 'Face with tears of joy' as the latest in the 'Learn a new word' series is that it reminds us (again, as if we needed reminding), that methods, manner, and styles of communication, even 'serious' communication, change and morph over time. We are not writing long-winded memos any longer, no one has tolerance for lengthy emails, voice mail is just about dead as a business tool, and so on. 

With the growth in popularity of short messaging services, (SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, etc.), the style of interaction on these services are changing and adapting to the medium. Throw in the seeming information overload/time crunch that almost every professional you know will claim these days, and the ability to convey complex information in the shortest, most succinct way possible is a skill that is at a premium.

And since this post has already gone on too long for a post that is more or less about getting your point across more quickly, I will leave with this - it is probably time to step up your emoiji game. As much as I cry a little inside to say that.

Have a great week!

CHART OF THE DAY: All email, all the time

So I have a theory about this week, the week leading up to the long Labor Day weekend in the USA, and the unofficial end of summer. After Labor Day the kids are all back to school, vacations have pretty much all been taken, and all of a sudden you realize that there are still 18 big unfinished items on your 'Things I wanted to get done in 2015' list.

So this week is it, the last 'fun' week more or less, before the end of year holidays kick in. So have fun. And don't expect too much out your humble correspondent this week either. I want to enjoy the end of summer too.

Full disclosure: I did not want to blog about email AGAIN. Even I am sick of it. And it kind of doesn't matter anyway. But over the weekend I (once again) received at least a dozen or so work-related emails, none that I would classify as urgent, and by the end of Sunday night I couldn't help but have email (again) on the brain. 

Please stop emailing people on the weekend. Really. I am begging you. 

Anyway, here is the Chart of the Day, I almost forgot that was the point of the post. According to some recent data spotted on Business Insider it seems like for most folks email is either an obsession, or something you don't care much about at all. 

Let's take a look at the data, then some FREE comments from me after the chart:

What to make of this data - where the vast majority of people either are on email all day long or just once or twice a day?

1. It should be really, really easy to figure out what kind of person (a check all day or a check once a day type) you are dealing with after one of two email exchanges. From the data we see that from the wide divergence in how often people like to deal with email making any kind of assumption about expected email responsiveness is probably a bad idea.

2. People who check email all day long every day often cannot understand and have little patience for folks who fall on the other end of the spectrum. Think about your own preferences and usage of email. If you are constantly on your email all day long just how frustrated do you get with people who do not share your email obsession/enthusiasm. 

3. This isn't an email-specific take, and really doesn't have anything at all to do with the chart, but I wanted to share that I finally came to my senses and turned off just about all visible and audible notifications in my phone. The only time my phone now 'pings' me is when I am getting a call or a text. No more email notifications, no more 'someone mentioned you on Twitter' alert, no more 'breaking news' type messages. It is remarkable how much better and I hope healthier I feel about my relationship with my phone.

Ok, that's it, I am out. It is still summer after all. 

Have a great week!