Americans obsess over e-mail? Ask a Microsoftie…

Om Malik, a new add to my blogroll, comments about how Americans are obsessive about checking e-mail. Om, you ain’t seen nothing. If you poll Microsoft PMs, you’ll find:

• 100% check email first thing in the morning
• 98% check email in middle of the night
• 99% check it right after dinner
• 97% check e-mail right when they get home from work
• 100% do so right before they go to bed

There’s about a +3% margin of error possible with those stats. MSFT PMs also typically have Windows Mobile devices, such as the Scoble Phone, which syncs down their e-mail 24/7.

There’s a huge e-mail culture there – it’s completely embedded into how things work up in Redmond. The environment was so e-mail centric that many of my old co-workers never used IM even though it would’ve been way more efficient.

I’m fascinated by how the different communication media people use affect the dynamic of the work environment.

• At MSFT, it wasn’t atypical to have people isolated in their offices; pretty much their only contact with the team around them being through e-mail.
• At Google, we were all crammed into cubicles and the natural mode would be a face to face discussion, usually with 2-4 people.
• At Plaxo, we have an open work environment; no one really works in an office and we’ve taken down the cubicles. Everyone can see everyone else pretty much all the time. In this environment, when a discussion starts, any interested parties naturally join in. It’s not uncommon for someone to ask someone else a question and inadvertently start a huge involved discussion. We get many more viewpoints in the discussion and everyone stays up to date on what’s going on.

At Plaxo, people say they get buried under e-mails when they get maybe 50-75 a day. At MSFT, that’s approximately how much a typical PM gets in an hour