TO ‘CC’ or not to ‘CC’

Preetinder Kaur

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Email and electronic communication is an essential part of workplace communication now. However, many employees are still not fully conversant with some basic rules and etiquette of emailing. CC is one of these.  Simply put CC is an acronym for ‘Carbon Copy’, which was popular in offices decades ago to get the duplicate copy of the document. But today CC is an e mail term that is often not used in its true sense.  Often enough one is ‘rigorously’ ‘CCing’ others like one tags a photo on Facebook. However ‘CC’ing is not a bad idea. There may be many rational reasons to copy someone in an email, like

1. Someone has told you to
2. All the respective members should have the information about the said topic in an email
3. All those included have to take action on the same

Let’s find out why one should ‘CC’ an email and when not to do it.

Pause and reconsider

Keeping people in loop by sharing a particular information is actually not the best way to keep your co-workers informed. Very often such mails are treated as clutter as only the main recipient reads these for information. Most likely he will check the CC list to understand why others in the loop have got this information. Your objective of keeping everyone in loop may actually become a major breakdown of communication pattern.    

Blind Carbon Copy is always meant for private communication

As we know that ‘BCC’ is a copy of the information, which you don’t want the recipient to know that you have shared with somebody else also. A private copy is to be used very carefully, as it is for very specific and confidential purposes. It’s always better to send an email to the recipient and go to ‘Sent’ folder and forward the mail to your private recipient in order to cut down the email clutter so that only specific information can be shared.  

Use ‘To’ field appropriately 

‘To’ field is for those who are directly affected by the message. They are those who have to take action, or receive information or report from your email. We usually make the mistake of putting one person in the ‘To’ field and other important recipients in "CC’ and ‘BCC’ field. 

Using all the fields appropriately is a useful way to de-clutter the inbox of your colleagues and seniors and an effective use of communication channels to be practiced. Whenever you ‘Reply’ or ‘Forward’ any message, think twice for considering the ‘To field’.