Businesses Looking to Remove the ‘Reply All’ Option

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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We’ve all received them and if you work in a large office, you probably get them on a daily basis; the dreaded ‘reply all’ forward from friends and co-workers. Companies are looking for ways to kill the ‘reply all’ button to save time and money in the workplace.

At least 15 percent of a typical office worker’s day is spent on e-mail, and 5 percent of e-mails received are replies to all.
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Screw that. I don't want to be forced to manually add lists of people when we have an important email chain going just because a few tards aren't capable of figuring out how to use email.
 
Math works out to 3.6 minutes. Seems kinda silly to discard a useful function over 3.6 minutes of an 8 hr workday.
 
staticlag said:
Math works out to 3.6 minutes. Seems kinda silly to discard a useful function over 3.6 minutes of an 8 hr workday.
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3.6 x number of office workers in the work force = Real amounts of lost productivity
 
That's a great idea! Let's get rid of a function to compensate for dumb people instead of managing them better.
 
The 'Reply All' button is not the culprit here. The real culprit is pointless email getting passed around the office. Removing the 'Reply All' button will simply shift inefficiencies to somewhere else by removing an effective and efficient method for communicating thoughts and concerns to a small to medium sized group and forcing that to be done in a more inefficient manner (i.e. listing them out one by one or calling a one hour meeting instead "because its easier"). Train people to not send pointless emails - a much better solution. If they have enough work to do it won't be a problem anyway.
 
crazypooljunkie said:
The 'Reply All' button is not the culprit here. The real culprit is pointless email getting passed around the office. Removing the 'Reply All' button will simply shift inefficiencies to somewhere else by removing an effective and efficient method for communicating thoughts and concerns to a small to medium sized group and forcing that to be done in a more inefficient manner (i.e. listing them out one by one or calling a one hour meeting instead "because its easier"). Train people to not send pointless emails - a much better solution. If they have enough work to do it won't be a problem anyway.
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QFT. I don't want my efficiency impacted because people are too stupid to take half a second and read. My entire team requires reply all because we have ongoing important email chains with dozens of different people.

I think the only email function that needs to be abolished is from private email accounts and that is forward. I can't think of a single important forward I have ever got from a private email.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
lol, sure they haven't :rolleyes:

Managing people didn't work, so the useless feature is being removed.
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Removing it is nothing new. There's been a GPO-ish way of doing it that MS published a kinda long time ago:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/09/29/3408403.aspx

Assuming that the capability is useless because it's often misused by people doesn't get to the root of the problem. People are the operators of the system, tasking it to perform based on issued commands. If the system is full of stupid Reply All spam, do is it fair to blame the system when there are legitimate reasons to use the function? The core of the problem resides between the keyboard and chair. It can be as simple as local policy or an unwritten rule from team management which is something that's even in the article:

When Gene Sellers, the head of a sales division at Wells Fargo (WFC), couldn’t get the button removed for his 20 employees, he imposed a “gentlemen’s agreement” on his team to abstain from using it.
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Removing the button doesn't fix a company's woes with impoverished management and the button doesn't have to go away to build a high performance organization. It's as simple as getting involved with individuals and putting out the word about what is and isn't acceptable, then correcting behaviors that are not. If someone disregards simple stuff like discouraging the use of Reply All, they likely have other problems and the disregard is merely a symptom of something else.
 
So going off his 3.6min. A day. How long would it take to read 20 people back into an email chain couple times todY. And heaven forbid you forget someone and coomunication on a project gets all messed up

Sounds dumb. Just write people up that abuse it
 
Why not just add a "Do you really want to Reply All?", or a "You have chose to 'Reply All', this could have serious life changing repercussions, do you wish to continue?" prompt?
 
The 'reply-all' button isn't the problem. It's a human behavior issue.

And my opinion is that manager is not doing anyone a favor by abolishing the "reply-all" button. That sounds like a passive-aggressive way for a manager to tell his employees to stop sending stupid crap and making stupid mistakes. Maybe you should just tell them to stop sending stupid crap and making stupid mistakes?

Blaming the button actually sounds like a managerial failure and an admission that your own people can't handle their own shit.
 
As already pointed out, the "reply-all" feature isn't the problem. OE is OE and isn't going away.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
lol, sure they haven't :rolleyes:

Managing people didn't work, so the useless feature is being removed.
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If you consider the Reply All option a "useless feature" you've obviously never worked on any large projects in a big business environment. The time spent to manually choose recipients would far out way the so called "lost time" they are talking about. And forgetting an important person in the email chain could have dire consequences for the entire project timetable. You err on the side of caution, it's better to get too much information than not enough.

I agree its stupid people that need to be "removed". That's a bit overboard of course, but sometimes I think it would be nice.
 
Why not just move the button somewhere else? Maybe not directly next to the Reply button.
 
SkribbelKat said:
Removing it is nothing new. There's been a GPO-ish way of doing it that MS published a kinda long time ago:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/09/29/3408403.aspx

Assuming that the capability is useless because it's often misused by people doesn't get to the root of the problem. People are the operators of the system, tasking it to perform based on issued commands. If the system is full of stupid Reply All spam, do is it fair to blame the system when there are legitimate reasons to use the function? The core of the problem resides between the keyboard and chair. It can be as simple as local policy or an unwritten rule from team management which is something that's even in the article:



Removing the button doesn't fix a company's woes with impoverished management and the button doesn't have to go away to build a high performance organization. It's as simple as getting involved with individuals and putting out the word about what is and isn't acceptable, then correcting behaviors that are not. If someone disregards simple stuff like discouraging the use of Reply All, they likely have other problems and the disregard is merely a symptom of something else.
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Grimham said:
If you consider the Reply All option a "useless feature" you've obviously never worked on any large projects in a big business environment. The time spent to manually choose recipients would far out way the so called "lost time" they are talking about. And forgetting an important person in the email chain could have dire consequences for the entire project timetable. You err on the side of caution, it's better to get too much information than not enough.

I agree its stupid people that need to be "removed". That's a bit overboard of course, but sometimes I think it would be nice.
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I deal on a much larger scale than you could ever imagine. The feature is useless for what you describe. If you need to communicate with groups, and have discussions to manage anything that has to go out to or be discussed among large number of people, then Reply to all IS NOT an appropriate way to manage a discussion among large numbers of people who may or may not need ever missive about a project or event. Period. We have groups and discussions to manage such needs that actually work without spamming everyone's email.

Training people does not work. Otherwise there would be no work around to remove it or push to remove it. Period. Talk all you want about idealistic solutions, when you actual deal with it you realize you have to be practical and practical is removing a useless abused liability as it is quicker, cheaper, easier, and more effective which then forces people to use the appropriate tools (and if you have to email a bunch of people that recently received an email simply copy the email addresses in as a group. It is not difficult).
 
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thats funny my company just enabled the reply all function after having it disabled after one of the executives replied all to some confidential info a few years ago.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
I deal on a much larger scale than you could ever imagine. The feature is useless for what you describe. If you need to communicate with groups, and have discussions to manage anything that has to go out to or be discussed among large number of people, then Reply to all IS NOT an appropriate way to manage a discussion among large numbers of people who may or may not need ever missive about a project or event. Period. We have groups and discussions to manage such needs that actually work without spamming everyone's email.
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There's no need to be presumptuous of person at the other end of the keyboard for the sake of adding weight to an argument. :p Scale and scope may not suit your specific circumstances (or similar ones for that matter) but the majority of business activities are coordinated on a small scale with individual teams focusing on a project or small elements of a large project. In fact, there are a lot more small organizations than there are large ones out there. (See Table 2b here: http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html) To disregard those is akin to erecting blinders and seeing things only as they apply to the experiences of an individual rather than stepping outside the proverbial box and looking with as objectively as possible at the totality of organizations and their objectives.

Training people does not work. Otherwise there would be no work around to remove it or push to remove it. Period. Talk all you want about idealistic solutions, when you actual deal with it you realize you have to be practical and practical is removing a useless abused liability as it is quicker, cheaper, easier, and more effective thereby forcing people to use the appropriate tools.
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Training is an on-going process. Instilling a culture in an organization isn't something that happens overnight or is a "we tried it once and it didn't work so we're going to exercise avoidance" sort of thing. Management, even of employees that are self-starters who know what to do and do it well requires maintenance and intervention. Training people doesn't work when managers don't see results and give up on something instead of understanding that keeping up with an effective organization requires constant vigilance and endless fishing around to determine what works. I think, if you ask around, you'll hear that there's never a magic bullet answer to getting people to do what you want. Whether it's not wasting time texting and updating a Facebook wall on company time or poking the Reply All button thoughtlessly, no one ever gets their way completely, but being proactive and involved when needed certainly helps a lot. Getting the entire organization to build a culture which promotes or discourages certain behaviours is helpful too since middle and lower management often faces frustration without top-levels buying off on something.

Anyhow, people problems are caused by and enabled by people. Ultimately, the best answer to people problems is either to replace people with cute self-repairing and self-replicating robots or to constantly work at correcting the people problems with a realistic eye on the fact that there's always one big dumb-face-head that's going to mash Reply All just to say "OK" to a message.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
I deal on a much larger scale than you could ever imagine. The feature is useless for what you describe. If you need to communicate with groups, and have discussions to manage anything that has to go out to or be discussed among large number of people, then Reply to all IS NOT an appropriate way to manage a discussion among large numbers of people who may or may not need ever missive about a project or event. Period. We have groups and discussions to manage such needs that actually work without spamming everyone's email.
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Please don't preach to me about scale, I left IBM after 10 years and am now with another fortune 500 company with offices in many parts of the world (though I only deal with the US). I think I can "imagine" what goes on in a large corporation.

If that approach works for you than I'm happy for you. But what you described is not feasable for what I need to do, or for a large portion of the business sector with where people are always on the go and can't at a moments notice stop and have a discussion or meeting. For some reason you just don't want to see that. It seems you're saying "well, this works for us, it must be good for everyone".

It looks like we're going to have to agree to disagree.
 
The above is probably a case where *email* isn't the appropriate solution, not the "reply-all" button.
 
There's also something to be said about stupid mail distribution lists that autocomplete where someone intends to send a message one place and the email program happily "corrects" the entry to something wholly different. That's just plain lack of attention to detail, though, and is again a people problem.
 
Grimham said:
Please don't preach to me about scale, I left IBM after 10 years and am now with another fortune 500 company with offices in many parts of the world (though I only deal with the US). I think I can "imagine" what goes on in a large corporation.

If that approach works for you than I'm happy for you. But what you described is not feasable for what I need to do, or for a large portion of the business sector with where people are always on the go and can't at a moments notice stop and have a discussion or meeting. For some reason you just don't want to see that. It seems you're saying "well, this works for us, it must be good for everyone".
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No, it's not "don't want to see that" it two fold. You don't know what you are attacking and we saw why your reply to all lovefest didn't work YEARS ago but were not able to transition to a better way until recently and now there is no way in hell we would go back. No, the problem is you don't understand how to implement a groups/discussion platform for management (I don't need to have 15,000 people on a reply to all chain about something not relevant to them or about someone in accounting having a birthday running rampant all day) of communications that only involves the pertinent parties and allows for passive information availability and personalized subscriptions. Given IBM's current emphasis on services, I some how doubt they are real big proponents of reply to all to manage information dissemination to parties where not all information is necessary to be sent to each individual rather than properly managing it with a groups/discussions approach. If your business is still doing that, they are simply handicapping themselves, which is fine. The uncontrolled distribution and efficient issues with either make you less profitable or kill you which is how the market is supposed to work.

It's not a matter of agreeing to disagree, it is a matter that reply to all was a liability to begin with and since more interactive, real-time, manageable, personalized, and targeted features for information distribution have become available for proper managing of such work it has become an even larger liability.
 
another small step forward in the business world... i taught my parents about this long long ago
 
I hate being cced on something an office move and they are letting us know to move their computer but then the dumb morons keep hitting reply all and our whole team is now getting emails about food left in the fridge and all other dumbass shit.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
...rather than properly managing it with a groups/discussions approach.
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Alright, do tell more about this "groups/discussions approach". Tell us exactly what you do instead and how is it relevant to the Reply to all feature which I happen to find very useful.
 
Ok, this is like a time warp or delay or something. Two years ago Neilson had reply all disabled from outlook because one high up person replied to all with very damaging comments.

The point is, what is all this buzz about again? Disabling 'Reply All' is not a hard thing to do.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
No, it's not "don't want to see that" it two fold. You don't know what you are attacking and we saw why your reply to all lovefest didn't work YEARS ago but were not able to transition to a better way until recently and now there is no way in hell we would go back. No, the problem is you don't understand how to implement a groups/discussion platform for management (I don't need to have 15,000 people on a reply to all chain about something not relevant to them or about someone in accounting having a birthday running rampant all day) of communications that only involves the pertinent parties and allows for passive information availability and personalized subscriptions. Given IBM's current emphasis on services, I some how doubt they are real big proponents of reply to all to manage information dissemination to parties where not all information is necessary to be sent to each individual rather than properly managing it with a groups/discussions approach. If your business is still doing that, they are simply handicapping themselves, which is fine. The uncontrolled distribution and efficient issues with either make you less profitable or kill you which is how the market is supposed to work.

It's not a matter of agreeing to disagree, it is a matter that reply to all was a liability to begin with and since more interactive, real-time, manageable, personalized, and targeted features for information distribution have become available for proper managing of such work it has become an even larger liability.
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Paul, you have absolutely no comprehension of working projects with people from multiple teams and or vendors. There is no easy way to make it perfect. Sounds like you work entirely in a closed ecosystem of recipients and I would wager you have very little interaction on a truly enterprise scale global fortune 100 or fortune 500 level company.
 
compslckr said:
Just use Bcc whenever sending to a mailing list. Seems easy enough to me.
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That only works if you do not have multiple large projects with multiple teams and/or external vendors. You are lucky to get their email addresses in the first place much less keep track of the recipients and no one has time to organize custom lists for vendors and contractors, especially when they add/change contractors at a moments notice.
 
if you have projects THAT large you should be using share point or some other project management system and have a project manager dealing with most of the information and who it goes to, not email, email is one of the most inefficient forms of communication these days.

The issue is management often doesn't want to use these new, more efficient tools, because it is easier for them on their smartphone to use email while they are not in the office.

When dealing with our side parties, most of these products usually offer them an email feature that they can become part of the project via email and not need a local account or access.
 
dgz said:
Alright, do tell more about this "groups/discussions approach". Tell us exactly what you do instead and how is it relevant to the Reply to all feature which I happen to find very useful.
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BBA said:
Paul, you have absolutely no comprehension of working projects with people from multiple teams and or vendors. There is no easy way to make it perfect. Sounds like you work entirely in a closed ecosystem of recipients and I would wager you have very little interaction on a truly enterprise scale global fortune 100 or fortune 500 level company.
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Welcome to Sharepoint, Notes/Symphany/Domino, Groupwise (blech), Apps, etc.

MrGuvernment said:
if you have projects THAT large you should be using share point or some other project management system and have a project manager dealing with most of the information and who it goes to, not email, email is one of the most inefficient forms of communication these days.

The issue is management often doesn't want to use these new, more efficient tools, because it is easier for them on their smartphone to use email while they are not in the office.

When dealing with our side parties, most of these products usually offer them an email feature that they can become part of the project via email and not need a local account or access.
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And we have someone who actually gets how it really should work.
 
Solution: BCC

To avoid Reply-All to large distribution lists at work we simply BCC all of the recipients - then nobody can clog everyone's email with a question that isn't pertinent to the 99 other recipients of the original email.

Too much email is a problem, but so are too many meetings. Business and their employees need to communicate more effectively. My pete peeve is people asking questions they've already been given the information for but are too lazy to look it up. I understand sometimes things get lost, but you know what I'm talking about - people who do it consistently and don't respect other people's time.
 
Hehe, SharePoint invariably ends up being a dumping ground for slide presentations and mostly meaningless spreadsheets. People tend to see it as a web-driven file server rather than a dummy-proof web interface to a SQL database. Again, that goes back to fixing people by teaching them to properly use a system. Once the goo-gaws over SharePoint fade and people become accustomed to using it, managers will malign it just as they did the telephone, fax machine, photocopier, and more recently, e-mail. Of course, the next shiny "it'll fix what ails your business" software package will be out by then and we'll be singing about how great the new thing is and how terrible the old thing was and we'll have the same discussion again about how the system will make everything that's been wrong with humans for centuries go away with the click of a mouse or the poke of a screen if the touch thing takes off on desktops (gesture at the hologram?). :p
 
I'm a worker drone, no use for e-mail. Only people with internet access is the manager and admin.
 
LOL...this is dumb. Lets change shit because people are idiots.

Fucking brilliant.
 
Paul_Johnson said:
Welcome to Sharepoint, Notes/Symphany/Domino, Groupwise (blech), Apps, etc.



And we have someone who actually gets how it really should work.
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No, we have someone that agrees with you, there's a big difference.

Listen, no one here is knocking Sharepoint, Notes/Symphany/Domino or whatever you find useful for your needs.
The point is it doesn't work in all cases and in many scenarios it ends up being much more work and time consuming - this could even be within the same company, different divisions have different needs. Emailing and "reply all" has it's place, many people don't have the luxury of sitting around all day waiting on the next meeting to begin or being interrupted in the middle of a project for a meeting about something that should have been conveyed in a simple email. If someone can't see that then they are very short sighted and I question the amount exposure they've had to different business environments no matter what their claims.

If I have a client that that needs to cancel or change an appointment we don't need a big meeting to discuss it. He emails me and the pertinent parties and I hit "reply all" and give confirmation that we'll reschedule. Now everyone involved knows where we stand and it only took about 10 seconds to accomplish this.

There is no right and wrong answer on "email/reply all" vs. "Meeting/conf/or whatever". The best solution is the solution that fits your needs. You're trying to say that your way is right others are is wrong. From what I can tell you've only been exposed to a very small segment of what goes on with the many different facets of businesses and don't have the background to make an informed, objective opinion. It seems as though no one will be able to get through to you, so I guess I'll have to leave it at that and be done here.
 
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