4 ms·

I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if tho

I see a lot of those too, and I am confused at the purpose. Clearly congratulations are warranted, but it would be much less wasteful of everyone's time if those were sent directly to the person being congratulated, rather than to the entire org / company / world. Is this just the sender looking for visibility? Does the recipient appreciate that yet another middle manager CC'd the whole company on a single sentence congratulatory message? Is there some other social function at work here that I don't understand? Sometimes I think it would be funny if all the individual contributors coordinated to ALSO reply-all with "Congratulations", but it would become clear pretty quickly that something was up, and it's a mean thing to do to whomever is being congratulated.

tenacious_tuna 2y ago
I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative expectations everyone is operating under. Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant. You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows. In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.
- techdmn 2y ago
  Well shit, I haven't been going to the all-hands either!
  - tenacious_tuna 2y ago
    I hadn't been for ages, and then my manager brought up my lack of attendance in my 1on1. I had a flash of insight that the point wasn't that I was missing an important communication channel (because that would have had obvious knock-on effects), but that there was a social issue at play, and that's what led to my view shifting to this social-fealty kinda vibe.
zuppy 2y ago
because those are supposed to be visible to each recipient by design. outlook will just show the emoji inside the e-mail header, nothing more than that, not as a different email. unfortunately, as this is not a standard, for users of other email clients this will not work as expected.

tenacious_tuna 2y ago

I've thought about this a lot in terms of meetings that don't have to be meetings at my org, and I think it's essentially an adherence to protocol that communicates a kind of mutual awareness and respect for the performative expectations everyone is operating under. Put differently, it's a kind of "parliamentary procedure": specific rules and expectations that everyone follows in the workplace to keep things "professional" and streamlined, in terms of interpersonal interactions. You may not actually give a damn about whatever the achievement is of Mx Boss, but you sending a congrats or party-popper emoji is sufficient to acknowledge that Mx Boss has done A Thing that Mx Boss thinks is significant. You may not care at all, but saying that to Mx Boss would have consequences, even if it is the truth that everyone knows. In the context of meetings-that-don't-have-to-be-meetings, it's (cynnically) a kind of show of fealty. I'm talking here about all-hands or whole department meetings, where every talking point is scripted ahead of time and you could pretty much just send the written up notes of what everyone is going to say already as an email and it'd save however many person-hours of work are wasted in just attending the meeting. For a while I was baffled about why our exec suite was okay with losing so much time across the org, then I realized in part it's an assurance of power: they declare a meeting, everyone shows up, and everyone is content within that social contract of how this stuff works. The point of the meeting isn't to convey information efficiently, it's to ensure that the power structure of the organization is functioning as expected.

techdmn 2y ago
Well shit, I haven't been going to the all-hands either!
- tenacious_tuna 2y ago
  I hadn't been for ages, and then my manager brought up my lack of attendance in my 1on1. I had a flash of insight that the point wasn't that I was missing an important communication channel (because that would have had obvious knock-on effects), but that there was a social issue at play, and that's what led to my view shifting to this social-fealty kinda vibe.

zuppy 2y ago

because those are supposed to be visible to each recipient by design. outlook will just show the emoji inside the e-mail header, nothing more than that, not as a different email. unfortunately, as this is not a standard, for users of other email clients this will not work as expected.