About nine years ago, I worked for a typical “dot-com.” We had a fridge full of soda, a shelf full of snacks, a pool table in the employee lounge, occasional ‘class trips’ to see the Seattle Mariners play, and everyone’s favorite — Fridays at 4:30, free beer.
One thing the company didn’t have was an actual product or business plan. Money from investors was great, but each time the company higher-ups changed direction or put a project on hold, those of us on the ground floor were left sitting at our desks, wondering when the work would start flowing again. Or whether we’d ever have work. Or how long we’d have jobs.
This was before Instant Messaging was popular. So my colleagues and I spent a lot of time emailing each other. As the end of the company was painfully obviously drawing near, the emails really started flying. We emailed contact information, letters of reference for each other, guesses and gossip and gripes about the company and what was going on.
And then the axe fell.
I tell this story because a recent study shows that internal email traffic may be an indicator of a company’s imminent demise. Of course, the study only looks at what happened at Enron in the month leading up to their (very public) collapse.
When things start to go south, the number of people you interact with starts to shrink. Or, more accurately, “email cliques” begin to develop, as workers begin email chains where they regularly contact only a subset of other employees.
The article goes on to say that this study didn’t look at the actual content of the email. And a sample of one doesn’t give the researchers a lot to go by. But it does seem interesting to me that my experience correlates to these findings. Whereas we used to send emails related to projects we were working on to larger groups — like Content or Development — we started sending messages to individuals. There’s no doubt we sent more emails all together, and definitely fewer to the masses.
I’m not sure this is an email fail at all. But it is about failure. And email. So it’s close enough.
