Recruiter Pat Bigley used to spend most of her working hours on the phone, screening and wooing candidates to take jobs in the video game industry. But now she relies on e-mail to complete as much as 70 percent of the interview process giving her better control over time management, even if she gets less face time with prospects.

“There are people that I’ve e-mailed for three years that I’ve never met,” said Bigley, president of video game recruiting firm Prime Candidate Inc. in Woodland Hills. “I honestly don’t know what I would do without it.”

As e-mail becomes a ubiquitous part of the workplace, it’s changed people’s habits and relationships with each other and with the work itself. And what’s emerged from all this e-mailing is that people in different professions are using the tool in different ways.

“If you’re in construction, you use a Nextel phone with a walkie-talkie, and that passes for e-mail,” said Marc Smith, research sociologist and leader of the community technologies group at Microsoft Corp. “But then there are the Blackberry and smart-phone users consultants, for example who are flying around the country and authoring messages in the back of a taxi. Their use of e-mail will be different.”

For computer programmers or developers, who work in common computer languages regardless of their spoken language, conducting business over e-mail can minimize confusion. A company can hire a developer in Russia “and as long as there’s one person there they can communicate with, 99 percent of the work is done by e-mail,” Bigley said.

In some professions, e-mail gets constant attention especially where there’s big money at stake.

“Every lawyer in our firm has a Blackberry,” said Mary Lee Wegner, partner with Alschuler Grossman Stein & Kahan LLP. “Now you’re available to opposing counsel or your clients on an almost instantaneous basis. I can be sitting in a courtroom waiting to be called, and I can be checking my e-mails,” she said.

Ditto for Wall Street types, although when it comes to sealing the deal, even extreme e-mailers feel the need to reach out and touch someone. “The more money that’s at stake, you tend to have more face-to-face contact,” said Hussam Hamadeh, co-founder of Vault.com Inc., a New York-based research firm specializing in career and workplace issues.

Schmooze factor


Experts who study e-mail use have noticed the trend. “The heaviest users of e-mail that I know also tend to be the most insistent on face-to-face meetings for important transactions,” said Jeff Ubois, an analyst with Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based e-mail and collaborative communication consultant. “The use of e-mail reflects the corporate culture.”

A survey of more than 850 companies by the ePolicy Institute, a nonprofit group that studies e-mail issues, found that over 50 percent of employees surveyed said they spend between one and two hours each day on e-mail, while 10 percent spend three to four hours.

Out in the field with his Blackberry, real estate developer Ken Kahan, president of Los Angeles-based California Landmark Development, can handle loan quotes from lenders or go back and forth with architects on plans.

While he sits down for his most important e-mail sessions at night, it’s no substitute for the schmooze factor. “People in the real estate business still need to meet in person to get to know one another,” he said. “The interaction that takes place fosters trust and later business ties.”

Predictably, regulation and the potential for legal liability have shaped the use of e-mail in industries such as medicine, financial services and law. Some lawyers, for example, refer to e-mail as “evidence mail,” and tend to use it more within the office.

Wegner said people will e-mail rather than pick up the phone or walk down the hall, but when it comes to e-mailing the outside world, “You look at it as if you’re writing a letter, because people print out e-mails and put it in a file,” Wegner said. “Lawyers understand that their e-mail could end up as an exhibit somewhere.”

On the other hand, stockbrokers are wary of internal e-mailing because their communications might be monitored by regulators and yet e-mailing to the outside provides a record of communications with clients who might be inclined to make a claim if an investment goes sour.

“The one thing I can tell you is that the financial services sector has traditionally been among the earliest adopters, not only of e-mail but of instant messaging and handheld e-mail devices,” said Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute.

Gene Munster, technology analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co., said he has between 200 and 300 e-mail correspondences per day. “It’s the backbone of all communications,” he said.

And yet whenever Munster writes an e-mail, he said he assumes that a regulator is sitting right next to him. “It’s taken a lot of the color and a lot of the flavor out of our e-mails,” he said.

New storage requirements mean investment firms have to retain data on all communications for longer periods of time, costing money and storage space. “You end up doing more business over the phone internally,” he said. “If people want details, we’ll just talk live.”

Doctors and hospitals, meanwhile, have been slower to adapt to e-mailing as a normal course of business. Some cite regulations as the root cause particularly the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which governs patient privacy and medical records. Current interpretations of the law prohibit exchanging identifiable patient information over e-mail.

There are concerns that health problems should not be handled over e-mail, especially when there is a possibility that the patient could be waiting for a response to a serious medical question.

“Doctors might respond to an e-mail, but I don’t know anybody who would out of the blue e-mail a patient with any kind of confidential information,” said Dr. James Atkinson, professor and chief of pediatric surgery at UCLA Medical Center.

Atkinson, who does include his e-mail address on his business card, has had patients e-mail pictures of surgery spots to him for discussion, but he acknowledges that doctor-patient e-mail is still in “the early adoption phase.”

There’s also the matter of doctors not being in one place for extended periods. “I don’t know any health organization that’s bought a Blackberry for every doctor, and I suspect the reason is cost,” said Dr. Sam Skootsky, medical director of the UCLA Medical Group, who hastened to add that some doctors at the hospital are active e-mail users, especially with each other and staff. While showbiz-types pay lip service to the importance of face-time, e-mail has taken over much of the business. “Where you used to get on the phone and talk to people all the time, now they want e-mail,” said Gordon Rael, an agent with Spectrum Agency in Los Angeles. “Most people will say e-mail me, e-mail me, e-mail me, they don’t want to talk to you.”

Rael’s inbox is stuffed with actors who want his agency to represent them, and he, in turn, stuffs the inbox of casting directors looking for talent. “It has changed business 360 degrees,” said Rael.

Some actors might be put off by the impersonal nature of e-mail in a business where performances on stage or off are part of the job description, but it is an easy way to stay in touch when they are out of town on jobs or holed up in their home office.

“E-mail is very convenient, especially in L.A. when you don’t want to drive if you don’t have to,” said actor Jeff Austin, who recently appeared on “NYPD Blue.” Before e-mail, Austin said he ate up a lot of time driving to locations to speak to people about jobs. Now, he said he can communicate from his local Starbuck’s, where he brings his laptop.

“I am on it all day long,” said Keith Lewis, president of The Morgan Agency in Hollywood, which represents models and actors. Lewis sends up to 225 emails daily.