In the era where most people check their office mails on their phone, selectively screen it based on the subject line/sender’s name are the email signature quotes relevant?
When most people don’t believe the signing their name at the end of the email is relevant, will anyone bother to read the signature?
You are paid to do your job, not open up a parish. Why on earth will someone quote from Bible/Geeta/Buddhism preaching and try to unsettle someone from a different faith? Worse some people use quotes to preach morality to the sender. What they don’t realize is that people don’t like to be corrected
Geeks: Some quotes like “There are 10 kinds of people 1 who ere are 10 kinds of people, 1 understand binary and 1 who does not” only revel that the sender is a geek, nerd or a socially awkward person. Hence it is sometimes important to see what your signature reveals about you.
Funky cartoons & multi-color quotes: Dilbert is sometimes considered acceptable but only if you are sending to your peer group and in-office social groups. Such messages if send outside the organization or to someone you have never met, better rethink your strategy.
Self-improvement: It is OK for a guy with an anger issue to put up a poster like “think before you react” in his cabin or on the fridge or anywhere else to serve as a reminder to mend his actions. However putting this in an email signature could mean only one of the two things. Firstly, you are preaching the recipient and highlighting err in their ways (which nobody likes) or advertising to everyone the err in your ways and creating a negative bias against you.
In short in today’s digital world people (even those sitting in the same office) rarely get to meet each other in person. This lack of physical clues has only aggravated the human’s need to put a picture to the conversation they have. Hence people often like to read/re-read emails and in absence of much information build a false first impression of you even before they meet you.
All said and done, in my first company, a senior guy Venu had a powerful quote. “Success is not created by cutting edge technology, but by solving client’s problems.” He single handedly steered the entire startup away from pursuing academic research and speeding up the quest to make a minimum viable product and launch it soon. If you have a mission in life/office: what better way than to incorporate in every mail that you send out. If your sub-ordinates and peers read it long/often enough… some might incorporate it in life. It is like a contagious smile in an otherwise emotionless office-space.
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