The Wired Office : When Computer Messages Fly, the Whole Workplace Changes

On the surface, the computer message looks so innocent, so harmless--just a quick, little, high-tech memo, yet another gizmo in the era of talking bathroom scales, Lazer Tag and address books the size of credit cards.

But electronic mail--which may contain an urgent directive from the boss, a pitch for a Tupperware party, the off-color joke of the day or all of the above--is profoundly changing the way workers relate to each other. Some who’ve done research on electronic mail, such as social psychologist Sara Kiesler of Carnegie-Mellon University, even argue that it’s on the way to “revolutionizing the workplace.”

Old rules of office politics, for instance, are being rewritten to keep up with electronic advances. And observers are also monitoring how computer messaging is increasingly enhancing the lives of natural networkers, speeding up decision-making processes and occasionally trashing the career hopes of thoughtless message senders in the process.

Gossip Runs Amok

Office gossip, for example, is frequently exchanged in computer messages with effects ranging from increased understanding of important business developments to damaging attacks on co-workers.

Richard Miller, vice chairman of the Electronic Mail Assn., cites the message of a managing director at an international financial services company. According to Miller, when the director returned to his overseas office after a U.S. meeting, he sent out a seemingly friendly message to those in his office, confidentially tipping them to the fact that major cutbacks were being planned.

“There was a mass defection. People in that office secretly had resumes out and were looking for jobs,” says Miller. “It turned out the guy had disseminated a false rumor. He was on his way out of the company and wasn’t going to go quietly.”

Some advisers on electronic mail etiquette caution that the medium may unwittingly escalate disputes because tactless, emotionally charged messages can be flippantly fired off--and instantly delivered to a co-worker’s computer--without sufficient time for reflection. The phenomenon is called “flaming.”

A recently retired, high-ranking supervisor at the Los Angeles Police Department says some officers have been repeatedly warned at roll call sessions about sending messages containing racial slurs and sexual innuendoes.

“This happened a lot,” the supervisor recalls. “We warned people they couldn’t get away with this the way they sometimes could on the car radios because there are records of the messages in the computers and they can be traced to the senders.

“I had to take strong disciplinary action--a brief suspension--against an officer who sent sexually and racially biased messages to communications division employees.”

A message sender in ARPANET (the pioneering electronic network used in part by research institutions working for the U.S. Defense Dept.’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) recalls another inflammatory electronic missive. The 1970s message invited some of the network’s messagers to participate in an early campaign to impeach President Richard Nixon.

All Got Their Plugs Pulled

“(The message sender’s) messaging group all got their plugs pulled as this didn’t go over too well with the generals,” the ARPANET participant remembers.

But Michael Cavanagh, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based Electronic Mail Assn., thinks the technology will change the landscape of the modern office in that instant communication will make everyone more efficient, and those who use it best will exercise commensurately more power.

“It’s just a much better way to do your job,” says Cavanagh. He says the number of electronic messagers is growing “at an astounding rate” and suspects his organization’s estimate of 6 million U.S. users is on the conservative side.

Electronic mail virtues frequently cited include the fact that the medium provides communication as instant as the telephone--plus a written record like the postal service’s conventional mail. As Kiesler of Carnegie Mellon points out, “Computer enthusiasts where I work will ask you if you want letters sent by computer mail or by ‘snail mail.’ ”

It’s also repeatedly noted that electronic mail does not necessarily require senders and receivers to be communicating at the same time. Phone tag can be eliminated. And workers who must frequently get in touch with people in different time zones point out that early morning or late-night phone calls are easily banished with electronic mail linkups.

Kiesler, with Carnegie Mellon sociologist Lee Sproull, has been conducting experiments and field studies on electronic mail since 1982 and the two are working on a book on the subject.

Productivity Increased

In one study on productivity, they tracked seven software development teams over a four-month period and found a statistically significant increase in the productivity of groups using electronic mail.

“The groups that used electronic mail produced better products in the end than the groups that didn’t,” Kiesler says, adding, however, that she has no actual cause-and-effect evidence for the improvement.

However, for those who are completely satisfied with their use of time, all this instant efficiency may feel like a trap. Indeed, social scientists are already documenting cases of message phobics, who refuse to look at their computer messages for weeks at a time; by contrast, message addicts spend an excessive amount of time engaging in electronic chitchat.

“E-mail is high-tech flypaper that doesn’t let you get away,” says Lindsay Van Gelder, a technology columnist for Lotus magazine.

“For starters, you have no excuses for not sending it when you’re supposed to; no convenient sleet or snow to keep your modem from its appointed rounds. . . . The most insidious systems even have ways for your correspondents to check up electronically on whether you’ve read their letters.

“But . . . the most annoying thing about E-mail is the way it subtly makes you more efficient. The whole system is rigged so that you do things today, not manana . . . . But what kind of ‘leisure’ are we talking about when your mail is delivered more times a day than the average person eats? And when it chirps at you every time it arrives?”

In other studies, Kiesler and Sproull have found that because electronic mail “is less hindered by status or corporate norms” and allows a low-echelon employee, for instance, to communicate with the executive director, it is having a leveling effect on traditional organizational hierarchies.

Identifiers Are Missing

“The only clue the sender has to the receiver’s identity and situation may be his or her name and writing style. All indications of the receiver’s job title, status, departmental affiliation, gender, race, appearance and demeanor are missing,” Kiesler says.

Kiesler and Sproull found, for example, that “when managers in mixed-sex groups were talking face to face, four out of five times the first person to make an explicit suggestion for a decision was male.” However, “when we put those same groups in an electronic mail network where the same kinds of problems were discussed, women made the first move to get to a decision as frequently as men did.”

And because electronic mail often allows workers to communicate with other workers at any level of the chain of command (without “the social context reminding people where they are in the chain”), “people are more likely to do end-runs around the chain. Sometimes they get in trouble,” Kiesler says. “Sometimes they don’t,” but the system is definitely fostering at least the sense that anyone is accessible, she says.

The Rand Corp.’s Robert H. Anderson points out that sending messages to large groups of receivers with the same amount of effort it takes to send just one message is more than revolutionary: “It’s fun, it’s fast and anyone can play.”

Will Touch ‘Social Structure’

Anderson, who co-authored a Rand report titled “Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail,” speculates that it “will become one of the primary means of communication for most of us . . . it is probably going to affect our social structure more than the automobile did.”

“The only problem is (if abused) the medium will sink under the weight of all those messages,” Anderson warned in his report.

Indeed, electronic junk mail is becoming so prevalent that some companies have instituted policies prohibiting or regulating it. In San Mateo, Calif., at Electronic Arts, the largest supplier of home computer software, about 200 employees regularly send and receive computer messages, along with an additional 100 throughout the world.

Like many firms, Electronic Arts permits personal messaging because it can help humanize a sometimes off-putting technology and contribute to office morale.

‘Electronic Junk Mail’

But recently one guideline was instituted.

“The only thing we ask is that when people are trying to sell cars or stereos, since they can send these messages to everyone, they should put a line in there that this is for sale,” says Stewart Bonn, vice president of the firm’s creativity division. “It’s only common courtesy. This is electronic junk mail.”

“Electronic mail systems provide an unprecedented opportunity for increasing the transparency of organizations, giving people a broad and deep picture of what is happening in their organizations--the nature of the business, the presence or availability of other opinion,” says Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School associate professor.

Zuboff, author of the just-published “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power,” believes the ability to send instant messages, memos and reports--to virtually anyone in the office--has the potential to transform that landscape because it challenges the way we’ve always done things, the way information has traditionally filtered up and down the management hierarchy, how it has been made available to some groups, kept from others.

Tradition, Technology Conflict

“I think the people who say that (electronic mail will prove revolutionary) are only looking at the technology. If you just look at the technology in a vacuum, it is a big opportunity, a revolution.” But, Zuboff suggests, if you look at it in the social context of the workplace, “you see that all of the history and tradition of the workplace are in conflict with many of the potentials of the technology.”

In her research, Zuboff studied eight organizations, including one she disguises as “DrugCorp,” which she says implemented an electronic mail system in 1979. She reports that the system “enriched the professional learning environment with an unprecedented amount of information sharing and new opportunities for developing collegial relationships.”

But numerous managers were critical of the system because it “challenged the basic premises regarding the boundaries between work and sociality.”

“Foul” and “embarrassing” communiques, for example, sometimes crossed unsuspecting workers’ screens--in the presence of managers. Rumors circulated that some bosses viewed personal message sending as a sign of “nonproductivity and a negative element in performance evaluations.”

Managers Defend Openness

However, Zuboff found that some senior managers defended the electronic system and its “risk of certain ‘conversational excesses’ ” in favor of the openness and informality the system brought to the organization.

In general, workers liked the system, Zuboff says. One user saw it as “a safety valve for the frustrations of dealing with the company.” Another argued that “companies are willing to set aside floor space and electricity for soda machines, candy machines, smoking areas and break areas because they recognize the need for breaks and humor during the course of a workday. If that’s OK, then it is just as appropriate for computer-based workplaces to have a computer-based coffee break.”

“To me, the message about this is really about choice,” Zuboff says. “The choice is a managerial (one) of how organizations are governed . . . that will decide whether the technology is used to reproduce the status quo versus using it as an opportunity to open up the organization.

“It’s very hard to call a trend on this issue,” Zuboff says. “History points us in the tradition of controlling information. Many places are ambivalent on this question.”

Management Change Predicted

Not everyone is so reticent. The Rand Corp.’s Tora Bikson, a senior scientist who has specialized in technology transfer issues for 10 years, suspects less hands-on management will ultimately result from electronic mail use.

“I think the really significant long-term change will be a major difference in the way we think about organizing our work . . . and who does what--more peer management and self-managing groups and much less hands-on management,” says Bikson, who has studied the computer systems in 26 organizations, most of them in Southern California.

“People like to communicate with other people. It helps them in their work,” she says. “It makes them feel good about themselves.”

Bikson has found evidence that “groups (connected electronically) will have more egalitarian communication and less top-down communication” in order to take advantage of the rapid decision making that is possible with electronic mail.

Fluidity vs. Rigidity

“If you have to refer everything outside the group to someone who’s going to ratify it, then all the fluidity you have will get lost in the old, rigid routine,” she says.

As for the personal vs. business use of computers, Bikson found in her survey of organizations that “some companies had no policies whatsoever. Some had very rigid policies about no use (of company computers for non-company business). Some said don’t do it during the heavy-use periods of the day.”

Despite rules in some corporations against the sending of personal or otherwise unprofessional messages, industry observers believe the practice to be widespread.

Television journalist Linda Ellerbee, for example, was fired from her job as a writer for the Associated Press in 1972 for using a computer to write what she calls “a long, chatty, letter to a friend in Alaska.” The letter, Ellerbee readily admits, suggested that her bureau chief, whom she named, might “rid himself of any discriminatory guilt” when replacing a departing staffer by “hiring a half-black Chicano lesbian who could handle the AP stylebook.”

Sent Out on Wire

The letter was inadvertently sent out on the AP wire to four states. Says Ellerbee: “There is now a clause in the AP handbook loosely known as the Ellerbee clause: ‘Thou shalt not under any circumstances use your computer for personal messages.’ ”

In less obvious cases, Bikson said, “it’s getting almost impossible to distinguish personal from business use. Everybody knows that if you’re a good business person you put some personal things into your business communication and vice versa as a lot of personal communication also involves help-giving about tasks.”

When it comes to policies on profanity and other types of communication some find offensive, Bikson again noticed no uniformity in organizational responses.

At Apple Computer, where the electronic mail system is called HotLinks, spokesman Rick Myllenbeck reports there are no rules and no problems.

Self-Censoring

“If somebody did something that others found offensive, somebody’d probably say to that person, ‘That wasn’t very nice,’ ” he says.

Robert Benjamin, Xerox Corp.’s manager of corporate strategies and programs and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, suspects such peer management is already keeping electronic mail in check at many institutions.

“In every company that I know (of) there was some kind of flailing about over profanity or dirty jokes that got up to the chairman and had to be quieted down,” he says.

“You had the good of increased interchange between people balanced against one or two excesses. But what you found was that the peer culture squashed that, just as it did for (telephone abuses).

“There’s always going to be a Lenny Bruce in every office.”