Email – One Machine to Another or One Person to Another?

Philosophers have wondered whether or not war is mankind’s natural state of relations and peace the exception. A corollary of this is that conflict is man’s natural state of relations; from individuals to nations.

Businesses are known to be exceptions when they exhibit great customer relations. Many firms spend significant funds training their employees in customer service; they would not need to spend these funds were conflict not the rule and peace not the exception. As I write these words I realize that another reason people need to be trained in customer service is that many (most?) employees are treated as machines, but yet they are expected to treat customers in a fashion that they are often not treated within their own companies. Remember, we no longer have Personnel departments, we now have Human Resources departments – who are we kidding?

The pitfalls of email are myriad, including misunderstanding, depersonalization, stressful multiple interruptions, knee-jerk reactions; all of these can result in conflict that may not have occurred in either face-to-face meetings or in telephone calls.

Staccato emails are some of the worst depersonalization offenders. A staccato email is one that arrives in our inbox, or is sent through our outbox, without a name in the body of the email – it is a piece of information with no personal element in it whatever, it is the equivalent of one computer communicating with another computer; “do this” “you did this wrong” “this is the deadline” “why isn’t this report in?” “what does line 12 on page 23 mean?”.

Do we not begin letters with the words “Dear Susan” or “Dear Mr. Jones”? Yet with emails we think nothing of leaving off the name of the person we are writing to, and why should we include it? After all, we are simply biological machines transferring bits and bytes of information to one another. When the corporate server at my job communicates with my laptop it hardly begins the communication with, “Dear Bob’s laptop”, so why should our emails be any different?

And then there are those emails without a signature; we think that having a “signature block” excuses us from ending an email “Bob” or “Bob Withers”, but that makes as much interpersonal sense as not signing a traditional letter and only including a traditional signature block with my printed name and title. Something apart from my proforma email signature block hopefully lets the recipient know that the email was generated by an actual “Bob”. But then again I don’t suppose our corporate server has a name and as far as I know my laptop doesn’t have a name so maybe I’m making too much of this.

If conflict and misunderstanding are the natural state of human affairs then I want to minimize the possibility of misunderstanding and conflict in my communications; I need to work at not being a machine transmitting data and at not being a machine receiving data. I don’t know if my fellow machines will appreciate this, but I’ve got to try.