Email Mistake

When it comes to human work, we are bound to make mistakes and have failures.  With being human, we are not perfect and will all make mistakes and in a work environment, it's no different.  It happens in all occupations. One of the biggest mistakes employees make in their work environments has to do with emails.

This clip portrays every employees nightmare, the reply all email that was only supposed to be a reply to one person.  Bridgestone Tire Company came up with this advertisement poking fun at the shame, embarrassment and fear that is instilled on us when this mistakes occurs.  Once we press send, it's too late, and our freakout begins.  The thoughts start circling on whether this mistake will get us fired, lose clients/coworkers/friends, ruin our reputation, etc.  Overall, we just want to find every person that receives the message and stop them from reading the email before it's too late.

In Sally Hastings article "Embarrassing E-mails in Organizations," she studies how e-mail is one medium of communication through which people engage in organizational communication and experience the emotion of embarrassment.  She provides the framework of "Facework" following Goffman's notion of "face".  According to Goffman, 'face' describes it as both an individual and an interactional accomplishment as the individual exerts efforts to maintain a particular image, but that the image is grounded in 'approved social attributes.  Hastings 'Facework' is where the employee seeks to maintain a professional image and to the organization in general and there are two faces (positive and negative).  As an employee we try to 'keep face' by portraying an image that fits the character of the perfect employee to that organization.  One little slip up like a reply all email which was only supposed to be seen by one set of eyes can ruin that employee's 'face.'