Learning to Ignore

Abstract

Bulk email is a primary communication channel within organizations, with all-company emails and regular newsletters serving as a mechanism for making employees aware of policies and events. Ineffective communication could result in wasted employee time and a lack of compliance or awareness. Previous studies on organizational emails focused mostly on recipients. However, organizational bulk email system is a multi-stakeholder problem including recipients, communicators, and the organization itself. We studied the effectiveness, practice, and assessments of the organizational bulk email system of a large university from multi-stakeholders' perspectives. We conducted a qualitative study with the university's communicators, recipients, and managers. We delved into the organizational bulk email's distributing mechanisms of the communicators, the reading behaviors of recipients, and the perspectives on emails' values of communicators, managers, and recipients. We found that the organizational bulk email system as a whole was strained, and communicators are caught in the middle of this multi-stakeholder problem. First, though the communicators had an interest in preserving the effectiveness of channels in reaching employees, they had high-level clients whose interests might outweigh judgment about whether a message deserves widespread circulation. Second, though communicators thought they were sending important information, recipients viewed most of the organizational bulk emails as not relevant to them. Third, this disagreement was amplified by the success metric used by communicators. They viewed their bulk emails as successful if they had a high open rate. But recipients often opened and then rapidly discarded emails without reading the details. Last, while the communicators in general understood the challenge, they had a limited set of targeting and feedback tools to support their task.

Survey on Deep Learning Approaches for Detection of Email Security Threat

“…The IDF uses the log to dampen the impact of high-frequency terms [98]. In the review study by Kong et al [86] enclosed are the management strategies to control the trafficking of the bulk email related to the promotion and advertisement of the organization or the media. The uncontrolled feedback on the product makes the user tired and wastes the time the user goes through every email.…”

Multi-Objective Personalization in Multi-Stakeholder Organizational Bulk E-mail

“…Dabbish et al surveyed 128 employees of a university and found that employees prioritized the emails from the senders that they had a direct work relationship with [13]. Kong et al [30] interviewed the recipients, managers, and communicators of a university. They found that the managers and communicators thought that employees should know about what was going on in the university.…”

“…In this paper, we focus on 2 kinds of stakeholders: the organization leaders and communicators who represent the organization's perspective, and the normal employees who represent the recipients' perspective on messages' work-relevance/interest/importance level. The organization and employees may have different perspectives [30,51]. For example, the university's board of regents might want all the employees to know about their meeting updates; then they put it as the first message of the Brief with the hope that all the employees who opened this Brief will notice this message (see Figure 1).…”

Reinterpreting excellence for sustainable competitive advantage: the role of entrepreneurial culture under information technological turbulence

“…It appears that there is a gap of priorities amongst the different stakeholders, which challenges the acceptability of dynamic information technology. For example, the technology innovators j MEASURING BUSINESS EXCELLENCE j may consider blasting emails from social media to provide crucial high-level information, whilst the firms did not view the bulk message in social media as essential information (Kong et al, 2020).…”