>Every internal email sent between any 2 people on the team has a certain list cc’ed that is accessible for everyone: For example if 2 engineers email with each other, they cc the engineers list, if it’s people on our customer support team they have a support email list cc’ed. Stripe was a great inspiration for this. (More about this)
Openness and transparency and honesty are great. But this seems like it's removing privacy, which sounds very tiring.
Wouldn't this just lead to people emailing less and having private discussions face to face? We're humans and we have drama and we need to vent from time to time.
At one level, you are right...anyone with experience in covering gov't knows that employees have long since stopped using their official email for dicey business, e.g. Sarah Palin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_email_hack
But an effect of this "you're being watched" is that you will modify your behavior to at least meet the spirit of the law, and this modificAtion can be I itself beneficial. Trivial example: I used to cuss a LOT...but volunteering in family friendly jobs forced me to not do that, or at least start using "gosh" and "shucks". I found out (as Orwell might attest to) that my mood overall improved without reverting to the negativity so reflexively.
In the case of Buffer...OK, some kinds of very important communication may be stifled. But a whole lot of non productive behavior (idle chatting via email) may be stifled. And then there are benefits of transparency, in which everyone realizes they have to start out in a consensus building mood.
And for the cases where you need to take someone to the woodshed, so to speak? Do it in person. That alone mitigates some problems that come from misinterpretation through the written word
And that's completely ignoring the shitstorm of emails one would recieve on any given day. Email is a drain on productivity and this seems like it would make it even more so. Having access to conversations between parties is nice but please don't send me meaningless emails all day long.
I would last 5 minutes with that policy. First order of business would be writing an email rule to delete anything that's not specifically sent directly to me.
It also seems like a bad use of technology. If any engineer e-mail also has to be CCed to the list then you should use a discussion board, or a chat room, or... anything that doesn't mean spamming everyone's inbox.
>Every internal email sent between any 2 people on the team has a certain list cc’ed that is accessible for everyone: For example if 2 engineers email with each other, they cc the engineers list, if it’s people on our customer support team they have a support email list cc’ed. Stripe was a great inspiration for this. (More about this)
Openness and transparency and honesty are great. But this seems like it's removing privacy, which sounds very tiring.