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.
You apparently live in a world where email shouldn’t exist and almost doesn’t. Even as a software engineer who rarely does anything important via email, I do not come close to living in that same world as you.
As for telling someone high in the company that they are a hypocrite, so much easier said than done.
Yes, it can be hard, but honestly, if I worked at a place where I wasn’t comfortable calling out hypocrisy, I’d look for another job. I tell the people who work for me to call out my own BS, and if I don’t fix it, to report me to my boss.
In fact, that’s related to how I left my last job after working there for 10-ish years. My boss (CEO) fired me because I pissed off his wife (President) by not working crazy hours. I had been there >10 hours, and was notified of a problem and helped fix it from home. They were both there only 3-4 hours/day and did a lot of WFH, but we weren’t allowed to do that. They ended up keeping me as an outside contractor for a couple years because my contributions were so highly valued, but they didn’t want me showing up in-person anymore (I apparently really pissed off his wife when I stood up for myself).
Work culture means a lot to me. If email is a core part of the company work culture, I’ll push back on noisy emails and get a good system in place. If it’s not, I’m upfront about largely ignoring the company email and ask people to contact me in other ways.
Also I find it a bit perplexing that you seem to suggest all emails carry the same weight (and that weight is nothing?). Within half a second I can easily look at a new email and tell if I can ignore it because they are sent to hundreds of people and doesn’t require my attention. In the same half a second I can tell if it’s from an individual, clearly making it something I should look at.
Maybe you’re so averse to email because you get far more of it than I do? I have a couple folders for automated notifications that automatically get sorted, but excluding those I probably only get like 30 work emails a week. Even after a vacation it’s not a lot of effort to go through the entire inbox.
That half a second to check an email is a meaningful context switch that disrupts flow.
