Next to posting blogs about technological issues, a problem about working with e-mail emerged for me a couple of weeks ago that was more of a psychological nature. While working for a project, I noticed that not only me, but also other people tend to slack off a bit if the general communication about the project goes through e-mail instead of face-to-face. Most of the team members tend to just read information by e-mail and not responding to it while if the same information is given by face-to-face communication, there a likely to respond. At the end of this process of passiveness on most team members, much of the work that should be done is still on queue and not everyone is updated to the latest information about the project. This troubled me a bit, because much professional communication is done by e-mail and it led me to wonder what percentage of the people that the e-mail is directed to actually read it. Because of this, much work is done at the end of a certain stage of the project and deadlines are just met or even missed.

As I mentioned, the biggest problem for this lack of activity is the passive nature of some people who are communicating by mail. They don’t have the will or energy of reacting in general to e-mail and just watch by how discussions are solved by other group members. This can be justified, because sometimes the extra information a person can add to discussion is not relevant, but the problem is that the passive individuals tend to think that way too quickly, because they’re not certain of their cause. This is especially the case when there are two or more individuals in the team that are more gifted, experienced or dominant than that person, leading to more uncertainty about adding pointless information to a discussion. This uncertainty is easily combined (but also easily confused) with laziness and lack of self-discipline, that should be punished, although only sometimes the cause of the passive nature of someone is known. A good face-to-face talk can clarify things.

Of course things are not always as easy just by talking to someone about why they are not doing there active best on e-mail. If things don’t get clarified by talking about slacking off during e-mail communication, there’re two things that can be done. The first thing is that communication by e-mail could continue like nothing has happened. In this case, the active members should count on the passive member to read the e-mails and contribute enough work to balance the total scale of work to the other members. At this point, when the project continues to suffer due to bad communication, important information can no longer be transferred by e-mail but only though face-to-face communication. Important stuff should only be exchanged in face-to-face meetings, because nothing else helps.

It’s understandable that too many meetings instead of e-mail communication can lead to an insufficient and inefficient way of working together. Some people just live too far to go to school for a meeting of an hour or less. This can lead to a lot of frustration of the active members as well. This is point that luckily almost no group has to go though, because in most of the cases, the passive member has become an active one out of fear of being kicked out of the group of being punished. But if the other group member are so frustrated by all travelling for meetings just to satisfy a single or two group members, they should really consider of releasing the passive members from the project team. This is a harsh measure, but sometimes just necessary if all else fails.