Emails - Cost of Poor Quality

What is Cost of Poor Quality? As we have learnt over the years, COPQ (Cost of poor quality) is the total financial loss incurred by a company due to providing poor-quality products or services to the customer. The major cause of COPQ are errors, rework, and/or field failures.

The cost of poor quality can be divided into four different categories: the internal failure costs, the external failure costs, the appraisal costs, and the prevention costs.

To calculate COPQ, you simply add the total internal failure costs to the total external failure costs. It's important for organizations to monitor and analyze COPQ to identify areas for improvement in their processes, reduce defects, and ultimately enhance overall product or service quality.

The question here is, does Cost of Poor Quality is only limited to the above factors? In the modern day’s era, where doing business in competitive environment and challenging situation, should we not look at all the opportunities to improve the business performance and avoid cost of poor quality and bring the culture of efficiency? The moment we start thinking about each small opportunities to avoid COPQ, for sure we will have more productive & happy employees and satisfied customers.

One such COPQ which for sure every company would be suffering or would have not tracked properly is number Emails everyday internal employee must be getting whether it’s relevant or irrelevant. For sure most of us, would have noticed email overload situation and it should be happening daily. The amount of email we send in a day would be 1/3rd of what we receive. In other words, email breeds, and where does this happen? The answer is CC field.

CC stands for “carbon copy.” Carbon paper is a type of waxy tissue paper that is used for duplicating typing or writing from one sheet to another. It was used by many companies earlier and even today it can be found at some places. Today, CC is a substantial cause of the email problem. If your company still relies on email to collaborate, then this antiquated acronym is stealing your time and costing you a big way.

Things to reflect, before CC or not to CC.

We cannot always avoid CC. There are rational reasons to copy others on an email:

• Someone asked you to do so.
• Your email message is genuinely relevant for all the recipients.
• All email recipients need to take some actions or part of actions.

If we are considering above factors and doing it with the right intentions, there is no problem in CC someone in the email.

However, do humans always work rationally? Nope. Here is what is encouraging all of that maddening unnecessary CC-ing.

1)????? Fear: Fear is a significant motivator of human behavior and during email too, fear plays a key part. The message we want to give becomes part of the saved record. The fear of letting boss know, what I am doing is one more cause of CC in the email. We should thus not let fear dictate our choices at the keyboard. Fear should not become motivation for copying others in the email and before we send email, we should think, pause and reconsider do we need to CC someone in the email which is not required.

2)????? A Need for Positive Reinforcement: Many of us use email as a tool to communicate our thoughts and accomplishments to boss and colleagues. There is nothing wrong in doing in sharing positive feelings, but there is a time and a place for doing it. Lengthy emails sometimes can cause more harm and can irritate opposite persons. Email which is sent to someone where no actions are needed from their end can be irritating for that person. If someone is sending email in the anticipation of appreciative replies, then time to pause, and reconsider do we need to do so. Rather than doing it over emails, can it be done during the scheduled meetings, and can the feedback be shared during those meetings?

3)????? Unproductive Defaults: There are some habits we develop over the period and those are kind of “defaults” we have within us. Default behaviors can be productive and unproductive. If we have empty drawers / bookshelves at home or office, do we keep it empty? Answer is, NO. We want by default empty space to be filled up and that’s our mindset. Likewise in emails CC field, are we ready to keep it empty or we are thinking it must contain something?

Another unproductive default is a desire to follow the crowd. Copying others and even replying to all become a part of a culture of email communication. It’s simply what and how we always do.

If the above factors are encouraging you to either CC-ing someone in emails, or reply to all, pause, think before you act. Rather, if possible, consider below options before you act on email.

• Discuss the issue in the next regularly scheduled meeting if it’s already there in your calendar.
• Address all recipients of your emails by name in the body of the email. If you’ve got nothing to say to them, then why are they copied?
• Reply only to people who are directly impacted by your response. Reply All only and only when it is necessary.
• Construct a single daily or weekly status update email to your manager in lieu of copying them on emails. Save it as a draft until you are ready to send it.

There is a hidden cost associated with each email and CC to the recipients. The amount of time and brain processing energy which is used and required when someone receives a CC messages, can cost company a lot.

If the email is irrelevant to the person to the recipient, the same is nothing but a “cost of poor quality” for the company. The reason is very simple. The one who had drafted and sent email has spent his/her time and energy in the thing which could have been done in any other important /pending work and at the same time the one who is receiving irrelevant email is just spending his/her time, in opening/reading an email, where they are not going to contribute in any manner whatsoever. The time spent by both sender and receiver can sometime cause a huge damage to the company. At the end of the day, the cost associated with the employee has gone in the work which is unproductive, and that’s where damage can be more than what we can imagine.

Imagine such situation, where company could have won big customer order by not taking time of Sales Director / CFO or CEO by keeping them in the CC; Or sometimes could have satisfied customer more by addressing the critical matter more efficiently over call/scheduling a meeting, rather than keeping it on email and playing a football game, which is always a time-consuming process.

That time could be a few seconds, a few minutes, or longer or sometimes even chain of emails can keep going back and forth, and thus this is nothing but a “Cost of Poor Quality” to the company.

Our measurement of COPQ in today’s era is not only limited to the product quality and satisfy the external customers. Rather, it should be other way round, keep your internal customers (employees) happy and efficient and see the enormous changes they can bring to the organization success.

Therefore, let's think twice, before we send any irrelevant email or CC to someone, which can cost company high and can bring down overall efficiency.