I mean, all of this is subjective and relative to context, but if someone can’t even respond to let you know they’re working on it in under a week, you probably have multiple other issues in your company beyond the individual.
And what does “fast” mean? I’m sending emails that are not urgent to respond to, but it feels like that lack of urgency is milked for all it is worth. I send them to people I know are in meetings all day. That way it’s harder for it to get lost. When 6 weeks go by and they’ve responded in no way, I don’t think the problem is that I sent it as an email. Even if it were only like 6 business days, that just feels like they’re either extremely disorganized or doing the job of three people (not the case with the biggest offenders at my company).
I honestly don’t check my work email at all unless I’m expecting something. Like 95% of the stuff there is crap from corporate (person X in dept. Y is retiring, make sure to fill out that survey, etc), and if it’s important, someone will mention it in our team meetings and I’ll search my email for it. All of our real work happens on Slack (so #2), so we pretty much never go beyond #3.
This certainly varies by company and role, but at least for mine, emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up. So if we have a transient issue with one of our cloud services, I’ll email their support department and consider the matter resolved. Maybe they’ll fix it eventually, maybe they won’t, but it’s not worth my time to actually follow up. But if they do respond, that’s pretty cool!
That said, if your company culture is to respond to emails quickly, then that’s different. I’ve just never worked at a company or role like that, all of my actual work is over IM or meetings.
I mean, again, I wouldn’t classify my personal expectation of a week or two to be “quickly” by a long shot. The usual offender here would expect me to respond to any communication channel, about anything, within minutes or hours. The company culture doesn’t really set any explicit expectations about email other than it shouldn’t be a channel for super quick communication.
To me in most of the cases I deal with, it’s a common courtesy issue. Questions about a major product that millions of people use in production shouldn’t be ignored, but they often are. If I sent the emails as Slack instead, it has historically been even worse of a problem because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later.
emails are where you send something if you want to say you sent it, but don’t actually want to follow up
If that were remotely the case, I’d never even check my email. That’s an odd standard to have, imo.
Then that person is a hypocrite. If they’re expecting responses quickly, but using a medium that’s not designed for fast responses, that’s on them and you should tell them as much.
because they are usually in a meeting and forget to come back to it later
Then ping them again. If it truly is important enough to send an IM over, it’s important enough to follow up after a couple hours.
I’d never even check my email
And that’s why I and pretty much my whole team doesn’t check their email very often. Occasionally there’s something interesting or useful, but almost never. Email is there to broadcast messages to the group that don’t fit nicely into an IM, and they’re usually accompanied with an IM to the group to look for that email.
That’s how every company I’ve worked at has operated. I’m not in sales or customer support, so it’s really not part of my job expectations to deal with email. If something needs to go to another department, it’s probably above my pay grade anyway, so I’ll ask someone else to handle it. I manage a team with almost zero interaction with anyone outside our group, and whenever I need to do something over email, I get explicitly asked to do so (e.g. I had to submit some paperwork for one of my employee’s immigration work, which I did follow up on promptly over email).
We do family reunions every year as well, and those are organized on email, but my parents send a text whenever there’s something important there (e.g. voting on where to go, what to do, etc). I pay attention to the email for the next couple weeks until things get resolved, then I go back to largely ignoring it.
I’m trying to do better about it, but honestly, there’s almost zero repercussions for ignoring it. The things I’ve missed are miniscule to the amount of time I’ve saved by ignoring it.
