Onboard but Left Behind? Why We Forget to Email New Colleagues and What to Do About It

We tell ourselves we won’t forget, but we leave them off anyway. A new colleague joins our company or is assigned to our project. We take her out to lunch and stop by his office to say hello. Still, when we need to circulate important information internally, we forget to include him or her in the distribution.

There are many reasons why it might be hard to remember to include a new person on an email distribution. We might be looking at or replying to a message that was sent before they joined. We might associate certain people with a project and we might not think of new teammates in connection with the issues we face. Regardless, the consequences of this common mistake at best are annoying: the new employee misses out and morale is lowered. Worse, forgetting to copy a colleague might lead to a missed deadline or failure to present a united front at an important meeting.

ReplyToSome can help make it easier for the onboarding of a new team member or colleague to stick. Here’s how:

First, ReplyToSome allows you to create distribution lists for your internal projects. See Tutorial 5 for more information on creating distribution lists.

When a new member joins, you can add their address to this group by selecting their address and clicking “Add to Existing” in the Contact Group Manager tab.

Not only will the new member be added to the group, but you’ll be given the opportunity to forward the updated group, together with a list of changes, to your colleagues.

Finally, when you receive or reply to an email for the internal group, the badge indicator will tell you whether the addressees match the current list.