Don’t Reply to All

Last night, at a dinner full of young professionals in Manila, the conversation turned (as it often does in such settings) to the challenges of working with certain managers. One issue that came up a few times was the use of “Reply All” on emails. Sometimes it was simply a time-waster (do we all really need to read that?) and sometimes, the emails contained criticism of an individual that should not have been made public. Not good.

Reply All has probably done more to ruin careers, wreck working relationships, and distract people from work than perhaps any other single aspect of the workplace. OK, maybe that’s giving it too much credit, but it sure does suck most of the time.

Information often needs to go out to a large group of people at once but responses to that info rarely need to go to all the same people. Such replies unnecessarily clog your servers and fill inboxes, and worse, they demand attention by a lot of your employees who have no need to be distracted by them. Once you get pulled out of your work it takes time to get back into it, and since most of us already have pretty poor email discipline anyway, the excess unnecessary messages simply pile on.

Some people find it useful for carrying on a discussion, but ask yourself if important discussions should really be handled by email, or if they couldn’t perhaps be handled better and more quickly by real-time communication like a conference call or IMs. If people are geographically dispersed and you’re sharing information across time zones where real time chat isn’t feasible, consider creating a group in your mail program so people have to consciously consider exactly who will be receiving this message, rather than simply hitting that one button (or hitting the wrong one) at the top of the screen,

You can issue a proclamation telling people not to use it anymore, and that can certainly help. Still, though, there’s the potential for accidental use (the cause of many of the aforementioned career mishaps) and there always seems to be that one person who thinks “yeah, but in THIS case, it’s necessary.” So consider just flat out disabling the option, if your IT department can do that for you.

There’s little to be gained and lots to be lost by using Reply All; isn’t it time that you do away with it?