How much is email costing your business? It is a wonderful and incredibly powerful tool, but in high volumes it can be stressful and debilitating.
Email can also change behaviour in disturbing ways, with individuals exhibiting all the symptoms of an impulse control disorder, as they check and recheck inboxes and run to the ping of a new message like one of Pavlov's dogs.
The damage this produces to organisations should not be underestimated: it can affect efficiency, productivity and customer service, all of which can reduce the company's competitiveness.
Email is hurting a lot of companies and the potential for problems has long been recognised. One of my favourite studies on the subject was conducted at Michigan University and Wayne State University.
Researchers looked at rising email use in a large organisation over three years and found that the massive increase in messages sent and received was accompanied by a drop in the amount of information communicated between employees.
That's a pretty uncomfortable thought when you consider where we have been heading over the past decade or so.
In the past two years, more businesses have recognised the threat that dysfunctional email environments pose to their operations and have started paying real attention to the problem, but by and large it is still massively under-recognised.
Corporations stand to benefit a great deal from making a serious effort to tackle it. Managers often don't realise how fixable it is. If you work in a department where a 100-plus emails a day in every inbox is normal, try counting up how many come from colleagues and how many from outside the organisation.
You will find, as in most large organisations, that the bulk of them are generated internally. That makes it a problem within your control.
Furthermore, there are tons of simple strategies to try.
- Email-free Fridays (customer contact centres excluded), for example, can work well to break email-centric cultures and change employee habits.
- Make email the second task of each work day. That way everyone accomplishes at least something on their personal to-do list before their day is hijacked by messages and requests from others. It is usually easy to identify big sources of workplace spam and to work on changing sloppy use of multi-recipient address lists.
- Departments that send out hundreds of for-your-information type emails are a good place to start (bulletins about administrative changes, for example, can readily be diverted to internal portals).
- The assumption that all employees need email can also be challenged. Some workers will benefit greatly from being unplugged.
- BlackBerry-type devices need not be deployed in jobs where anywhere, anytime access is not an imperative.
- Instant messenger and other interruptive technologies can be removed altogether. Most big companies do some measurement of the quality, depth and effectiveness of communications with customers, so why not ask employees the same questions? This can be a powerful way to highlight, to both management and employees, the many tradeoffs associated with email, and to get people thinking about the convenience factor for recipients (not just senders) before hitting the send button.
- Every organisation should deploy simple desktop indexing software so employees never have to sort emails into folders again.
- Strategies such as these depend on getting voluntary, bottom-up support from employees.
- Managers must lead by example and avoid trying to enforce new rules from the top.
In organisations with serious email overload problems, both the sickness and the cure will be readily appreciated by everyone, and it won't be hard to get a grassroots, employee-driven campaign off the ground.
None of these strategies are rocket science, none are difficult and for the most part they cost nothing (you don't hear that very often), but the results can be dramatic: a manager that put many of them into practice last year tells me they have completely transformed the working environment. All it took was someone to get the ball rolling.