Why people ignore mail
HBS -- Like many other co-workers, I ignore e-mail requests for assistance when the e-mail is sent to dozens of people. That's a psychological fiding--the more people that are queried for help, the fewer respond.
Greg Barron, a research fellow at Harvard Business School, and research partner Eldad Yechiam, a postdoctoral research fellow at Indiana University's Department of Psychology, studied why online help requests are sometimes ignored. They demonstrated that the more people queried, the lower the proportion of responses. These were clean results. Anyone surprised?
Social psychologists have been studying the diffusion of responsibility effect ever since Darley and Latane's influential studies that were motivated in part by the murder of Kitty Genovese in full view of 38 bystanders who did nothing to help. The same human response applies to e-mail.
Some lessons worth considering:
- It must be crystal clear who has the responsibility to respond to customer calls, no matter how many copies of the call go out.
- Managers need to keep their e-mails personalized whenever possible.
- Pick up the analogous costly signals in e-mails that signal their quality and increase the probability that people read and respond to the messages.
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge -- "Why your e-mail requests get ignored"
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