How to convince company to not go overboard with email signature?

Question

The signature culture at my company is dangerously close to ridiculous, and this question made me ask about it here.

We're an MS Gold Ultra Colour Plus(tm)(c)(fm)(wtf) Partner which is apparently an important marketing point, and a bunch of my colleagues have a wide array of certifications and other stuff they're very obviously proud of.

The problem is that it overcrowds the actual content in our email correspondence.

Thus, my question:

How do I, as a relatively new hire (5 months), convince the company (and esp. certain heavyweight individuals) to reform the Corporate Email Signature standard?

Below is a sample email that's common enough. The orange box denotes the actual content of the email. The green box denotes the amount of screen real estate typically available for reading email, when I'm not popping the email out into a separate window (which I did only for the screenshot, normally the main window is all I have). Everything below the green box is off-screen and requires scrolling. Take a good look.

Can you imagine scrolling through a long(-ish) discussion full of these signatures? It's difficult to focus on the actual content!

Plus, of course, they're taking up disk space (not so bad in itself, but times a thousand, times their uselessness when used for internal communication...)

Update: Yes, that is an actual (but obfuscated) example. I am delighted to have brightened up your day. I will not be trying to upstage them; on the contrary I use a very simple signature for internal mails, and a slightly less very simple signature for external mails. Frankly, I don't care about all those badges and am happy to see that most of you agree that it's "noise". More updates follow when I have more time.

Update 2: Obfuscated further. And I noticed that I received a close vote.

Update 3: I wish I could accept more than a single answer. Thank you so much. I've (carefully) asked about, and others have noticed the same thing and agree with me. I've talked to my direct manager and she will take it up with management (our org chart is very shallow).

Answer 1

These remind me of forum signatures from back in the day...

Anyways, in your example, it shows "CTO" as the sender - as a new hire you are going to have minimal influence directly, unless you are a C level executive yourself. A wise perception.

What I would do is ask more indirect questions like:

• "Do you think we could add more space or a divider between the signature and your name? It's hard to quickly parse the content of the email with such a big signature - but with more space between the email and/or a more clear divider it would help."
• "Do you think we could make the images in our signatures smaller? It's hard for people to see all them at once - if they were smaller we could put them on the same line. This probably would help other people more reliably see our qualifications."

Your goal isn't to jump to the "wait we do what with our signatures" - but to ask leading questions. It feels less accusational and with signatures like that I'm sure that the C-level folks have at least thought about how ridiculous they are.

Get the CTO and other people to acknowledge how crazy they are by asking related -- but not direct -- questions about it.

Answer 2

I think that you as a new employee have only one option.

Take this ridiculousness to the next level!

Make it a point to go to a website that will give you "ribbon/certificate" for taking a small elearning at least once a week and keep adding these - of course in vertical orientation to your signature.

Only by seeing it well overdone will management come to their senses. Also make sure that you add your signature to replies too. This can easily be turned on in Outlook.

And to put a cherry on top - and this could not be used in all situations - but I am pretty good natured and a jokester. I would definitely include distant accomplishments in my signature.

• Kirkland Elementary 4th Grade Spelling Bee runner-up
• 3rd place in Townstead Potato Sack race
• Can type on two keyboards at once
• Voted most likely to get pulled over by cops (senior year high school)

Gustavo in the comments mentions flashy GIFs. You could take your current animations and make them blink or turn them into oldschool flash cartoons. Personally the most obnoxious might be the zoom-in, zoom-out effect. Not only might you get your point across but you can showcase your design skills. (Note that an evil genius CTO might see yours and understand your point but then have you update theirs with the animated gifs and flash.)

Answer 3

As you're a new hire and unless you were hired in a marketing/branding position you won't really be qualified to suggest change or have the political capital to push it through. That signature is so far beyond the reasonable that I don't think you'll have much luck openly campaigning for change.

The only reasonable and safe course of action to take in your situation is to lead by example. Convert that entire mess of banners into a single modestly-sized banner. Find the smaller versions of those logos (i.e. the ones actually meant for inclusion in an email) and convert all of them into a single banner image that's no more than few lines high.

Whenever someone notices or comments on your signature, explain that you preferred a more subtle and cleaner look for your signature. With any luck, this will make its way up the management chain and if there are any reasonable managers left they'll then have an alternative design they can use to convince the maniac who standardised this.

Answer 4

My first instinct when I read this question was to check if there was a way to read emails from a specific group of users in plaintext format. I looked around for a bit, and not surprisingly, it didn't take long to find out that other people have faced this problem before.

This answer on superuser, for example, suggests setting up an Outlook rule to move mails with too much junk to the appropriately named Junk folder, and reading mails in that folder in plaintext mode.

Naturally, that doesn't solve the problem at its source, but considering how Office Politics works typically, you probably don't have much of a chance of success there anyway.

Answer 5

It would be probably safest and most effective if you could demonstrate that this truly horrible email signature they think highlights how impressive they are actually makes them look completely unprofessional and amateurish. Bonus points if you can tie it back to the one thing that really matters to a corporation (money) and come to the table with something better.

I can't imagine it would be difficult for you to get feedback from your friends and colleagues on the topic, nor would it be overly difficult to redesign it so that the worst parts (the very over-sized Microsoft App partner image and the 2015 partner of the year finalist image) are eliminated/changes into simple urls, or sized and placed more appropriately, instead of in the style of a tween who just figured out how to make a MySpace page back in 2003.

"Look, I'm getting a lot of negative feedback about our email signature from potential clients/customers, and I think it's costing us money... for example, [provide some documented examples]."

To help get you started, some feedback from a few IT professionals on your company's signature:

The company I currently work for has a ~ 4 KB corporate logo in its email signature. It used to be directly attached to the email itself, until we had a single complaint from a customer that it was clogging up their ticketing system. I was tasked with transforming it into a link that can be loaded/fetched, rather than a direct attachment... it's hard to make a better case for change than complaints from a customer do. (Personally, I find it hard to imagine that customers/clients and potential customers/clients aren't sniggering and complaining about this email signature, so I'd think that you'd be able to gather such feedback from the people who matter to your business passively and with minimal effort.)

Answer 6

We're not going to be able to help you navigate the corporate hierarchy, you need to make some judgement calls yourself. But if you want to do this, you'll need to do something like:

• Determine if there's a standard or if it's a culture thing.
• If it's a standard, work out who put them there, what they're trying to achieve, and how they think the banners do that.
• If it's a culture thing, make changes yourself and talk to those you work closely with about it. Chances are you'll get leads like 'X sent this round asking for it to go there', in which case talk to X. Be prepared - if the people closest to the customer who can best judge the business value of these (marketing, sales, etc.) love them you might be fighting a lost cause.
• Explain the potential harms (e.g. risk of emails ending up in spam filters; difficult to follow conversation; customers may see it as unprofessional; bandwidth and storage costs).
• Ask if the same goals can be achieved in some other way. (e.g. if it's really important, combine them into a single image, centrally sourced, professionally designed, optimised for email and regularly updated).

Answer 7

There's ample evidence in various studies and articles to demonstrate that email signatures like your company's are counter-productive. I googled "When do email signatures hurt" and found a bunch of good articles.

I won't repeat the advice of others about getting the message up, except to say that as a new employee, you might have a little more leeway than others to broach the subject. "When I first got an email from us when I was in the hiring process, I noticed the signature and thought it seemed odd. Since then I have done a little looking and wonder if we're hurting more than helping? I assume we have thought about this, but just something we may not have considered."

Or find a way to show them you care, and point them to other answers here :-)

Answer 8

Depends where you are. Here in Germany an e-mail is an official document, so the footer contains:

My name, position and department, the post address, various telephone numbers and website.

Then a baby logo

Then it contains the official stuff; the registered office, district court, managing directors, etc. This part is mandated by law and is not negotiable.

Then a note about confidentiality.

On the other hand we don't have any header at all. You could persuade them to do without the opulent bit at the top. You can see all that in Outlook or whatever anyway.

Answer 9

There's no way that managers who have to read 20+ emails a day are actually wading through all those signatures to see the content. There must be something different about the way they read emails: maybe they don't view threaded conversations (so they never need to scroll past the signature), or their email client hides the signatures.

Maybe you should show them what it looks like on your screen. It might surprise them.