So I’ve been in a “real world” job for a couple of months now, and it is safe to say I’ve learned a few things. Many of these have been things I expected to learn at a new job, like the best way to communicate with my supervisor, how to actually fulfill those bullet points in my job description, and where the cafeteria is. One thing I did not expect to learn so much about, however, is email.
As a leader of one of the more active organizations at my college, someone who has held an office job before, and someone who has lived most of her life in the 21st century, I was pretty sure I was already good on the subject of email.
I was, as is the case with basically everything to do with young adulting, more than a little off.
It turns out that email, just like everything else, has its own culture. And in the culture I’ve entered, it is common to get a response before you can even imagine that your message has flown across the network and into the computer of your colleague.
Getting a response back to the sender, or getting the email forwarded on to the appropriate person while informing the sender, is of the utmost importance. And it needs to happen right away. I entered the workforce straight out of the more leisurely ways of midwestern small college email, and this realization was kind of a wakeup call.
I discovered my main job with email, whether I like it (or find it to be practical or helpful to anyone) or not, is to get it away from me as soon as possible.
I had been unknowingly playing a game of hot potato, and I had been playing it badly.
It went something like this:
I would begin work on whatever the “potato,” required, but not send back a response immediately, responding when the inquiry had a full answer, or when I finished another task I was doing.
Meanwhile, my boss was responding at best with a, “Have you thrown back that potato yet? I’m pretty sure you just lost this game.”
At worst, not replying to an email immediately would cause situations to become more urgent than they needed to be, and then my boss responded more like, “OH MY GOD YOUR DESK IS ON FIRE,” while trying not to kill me because wow this girl is an idiot.
So after getting my hands or desk burnt a couple times, my new response to email is more like:
Okay, so maybe it is not that dramatic.
But I’ve learned that almost every message merits some immediate response, even if it is just to say that you will work on whatever issue was brought up, or to say thank you (business talk for “I got this thing you sent me”).
And yes, this system is very annoying, because some issues really only take less than an hour or two to resolve and probably don’t merit a response just to say you are working on it. And no, not every new piece of information really needs to be followed up with a “Thank you!” to confirm you’ve read the email. And yes, I think that this culture makes email take over our lives way more than it should.
But some cases of this practice are actually really nice and courteous, and I should have been doing them already. And some cases will make you look really good at your job when really you are just passing the work on to other people. Double score! (Obviously, only do this when the email is actually the other person’s job, like if someone needs help from a specific office.)
As for everything else, all I have to say is that you do not want to be the last one holding that hot potato.
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Email is actually pretty complicated. What have you discovered about it in your months (or years) in the field? Tell me your embarrassing stories and we can save others from our mistakes, or ask me a question and I’ll go looking for the answer for you (using more than just Google, but let’s be honest, probably some Google).
youngadulting 