In one of my early posts on here, I bewailed the infuriating local proclivity for breaking off all contact rather than delivering 'bad news'. I don't say it's a uniquely Chinese - or Asian - vice; but I fear it is especially common here. And this week, I'm suffering another big dose of it. There are five people to whom I sent important e-mails at the start of this week. Five people from whom I really require a prompt response. Five Chinese women: all very well educated; all in middle management roles; all with good enough English that you wouldn't think anxieties about expressing themselves clearly in an e-mail would delay or prevent their replying. But, after four days, I hadn't had a reply from one of them. One did at least respond fairly promptly when I started following up by text message. She claimed my e-mail had been eaten by her spam filter (which, I suppose, is plausible; although this hadn't been a problem with any of the other e-mails we've exchanged over the past month), and then sent me the reply I'd been waiting for yesterday evening. Not too bad. Though I'm very sceptical about that 'lost e-mail' excuse: I suspect she was just slapdash in working through her Inbox. Two of the others - both very important, since one involves a payment that is due to me, and the other involves a negotiation on a new training contract - are still failing to respond even to SMS. This probably betokens bad news. But not nearly as bad as provoking me into going round to their offices in person and tearing them a new arsehole each.... The other two, I find, I don't have mobile phone numbers for; so I'll just have to try calling them at the office on Monday. WHY? Why are people so crap like this? Why are they so lazy, so inept, so rude? Oh, I know what it's like to be inundated with e-mails, and to find it difficult to keep track of which ones need a reply, which can be read without replying, and which can just be deleted or ignored. But you have to be disciplined and thorough and conscientious. However many e-mails you receive each day - whether it's 50 or 500 - you have to devise a system for dealing with them effectively. If it's a personal e-mail (rather than a group mailing), and it's asking for action or information from you (rather than just providing you with information), then it requires a reply. And if you don't have time to reply in detail, or you won't be able to give a substantive response for a certain period of time, you still need to acknowledge the receipt of the message immediately, and give some idea of the timeframe for providing a full response. Acknowledging an e-mail - "Thanks. I'll try to get back to you by the end of the week." - takes a matter of a few seconds. It's really not hard at all - even for people who are very shaky in their written English. Acknowledging e-mails is especially important these days, when overactive spam filters - and other Internet glitches (here in China, the rampant Net censorship adds to the occasional unreliability of e-mail transmission) - do gobble up such a lot of correspondence. Acknowledging e-mails promptly and consistently will save business relationships from going sour. And it will also save a lot of time - because some people, not everyone, maybe, but some people (like me, of course), if they don't receive an acknowledgement of an important e-mail, will follow up every two or three days until the end of time.... and you really don't want your Inbox getting filled up with that kind of bad karma, do you? So, pretty please with sugar on top, answer your f***ing e-mail, will you? |
Friday, October 23, 2009
The wall of silence (AGAIN)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
"since one involves a payment that is due to me"
That's the one you'll never hear from again.
And yes, it is especially common there.
Valiant effort, but that is one very large windmill you're tilting at. You'll never change a culture-related behavior. I have a hard time getting my students to stop saying "Bye-bye," much less anything substantial.
Never say never, DL.
You have to keep fighting the good fight.
And I have enjoyed little glimmers of success with this kind of thing here and there.
I get fed up of the Chinese using the 'culture' defence to try to make a sacred cow out of what is basically just a bad habit.
With my current raft of bad e-mailers, I think there's only one who might possibly not be replying because she doesn't want to disappoint me by rejecting my training proposal (and even there, I suspect she's just being CRAP; that she is going to accept the proposal, but doesn't realise that failing to acknowledge receipt of it - even after reminders - is jeopardizing the relationship). In most cases, it's just a case of being scatterbrained.
I sympathise with how difficult it can be to manage e-mail in the modern office, and I appreciate that trying to do this in a second language must make things many, many times worse. But I've worked in and visited enough offices to know that most people are just slapdash about dealing with e-mail: deleting without reading when they're in a hurry, reading but failing to reply or flag for futher action, failing to check their Spam folder once in a while, and so on.
With the Chinese, you can usually add on a whole extra layer of laziness and disorganization. There's one Chinese office - actually the headquarters of a British company - that I used to visit quite a lot, and every single time I went there almost every member of staff would be busy QQ-ing someone, or watching videos on Youkou, or playing some online game or other. Every single time.
I'm told that a 'work ethic' is supposed to figure in Confucianism, but it got lost somewhere.
As I suspected, the training proposal lady was just being crap. (I'm developing 'psychic powers' after all this time out here!) She finally got back to me with a flustered I am so busy these days. It's not clear what exactly she's 'busy' with, since she clearly is not doing her f***ing job.
And the payment lady also got back to me - after 5 days, and 2 SMS follow-ups, and one feeble "Oh, I thought I replied to you this morning; I can't think why this e-mail didn't go through" temporizing excuse. It's a British company; so, rather than not pay me at all, they're just going to try and pay me rather less than they owe me. I had thought they were only stiffing me by 30% (of a very small amount), so it wasn't worth getting too bothered about. But.... after examining their pay schedule more closely, I discover they've been consistently - though probably inadvertently - witholding one type of fee for the past two years. So, they're actually underpaying me by a few thousand kuai, and that is going to be a huge f***ing problem. Since it is a British company, I'll probably take it up with their head office (and pursue it through a UK Employment Tribunal, if necessary; although I don't think it will come to that).
What larks.
Post a Comment