When in doubt, blame your email client.
That’s the conclusion that the executive team at Nielsen, the TV ratings people, reached when assessing their overloaded inboxes. The problem wasn’t foolish or lazy overuse of the “reply to all” feature. It was the very existence of that feature in the first place. REALLY?
From the Yahoo! story:
Nielsen … issued a pronouncement that, in order to “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency,” it would be implementing a plan to remove the “Reply to All” feature from employee’s Microsoft Outlook installations.
From the company’s memo on the subject: “We have noticed that the ‘Reply to All’ functionality results in unnecessary inbox clutter. Beginning Thursday we will eliminate this function, allowing you to reply only to the sender. Responders who want to copy all can do so by selecting the names or using a distribution list.”
Nielsen says this will save server space and time spent on behalf of users who have to waste up to three seconds deleting irrelevant messages. Of course, it will take significantly more time for senders to manually add recipients, or copy and paste them from a previous email, when messages do need to involve multiple people. I expect Nielsen employees should also probably expect to spend more time in physical meetings as they’ll get less done electronically.
As Sabrina said on the Bplans blog, maybe they should just hire smarter people? (Or work on changing the typical big-company culture of copying messages to everyone up the chain to show how much work you are doing.)
