Guest Blogger Jiten Patel is an ICT & Multimedia Assistant with Think Productive in the United Kingdom. You can find them online at www.thinkproductive.co.uk

There was a great episode of BBC’s Money Programme a few weeks ago.  It was an episode that focused on email and the stress it causes in offices. 

We live in the “Information Age”, where information has never been so readily available.  In fact, our people these days are bombarded.  David Allen, the author of “Gettings Things Done” was asked in an interview what’s changed in the world and his response was “Nothing.  Just the speed and volume of whatever we’re dealing with”.  I think this information overload – from email, and indeed from all sides! – is a much bigger challenge than we realize.

Research carried out by the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley has discovered that one third of email users get stressed by the heavy volume of e-mails they received. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7049275.stm)

One of the common solutions talked about in helping to solve this issue of email overload is the idea of a regular ‘no email days’: that is, no internal emails allowed for an entire day.  The idea is based on 3 key assumptions:

  • That email is too readily available and people send more emails than they need to
  • That email is not always the best or only medium to communicate information, even if it may often be the most effective
  • That people need rules – either self-initiated or boss-initated – to change behavior.

I think we would probably all agree with these assumptions, but I wonder whether ‘no email days’ really is the best solution. 

Nestlé Rowntree was the first company in the UK to introduce such a policy, after management were informed that employees were spending more time typing than talking to each other; they also found examples of people sending e-mails to colleagues who were just a small distance across from them, rather than actually speaking to them directly. (http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/idea.php?ideaId=4312)

When e-mail behaviour was tracked it was found that many were checking their inbox as often as 30 to 40 times per hour. The volume of e-mails has exploded in recent years with over 170 billion now being sent daily around the globe, according to technology market researcher Radicati Group. That’s two million every second! (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2939232&page=1)

Intel have taken a different approach.  Since email is not forbidden on the Friday; the idea is to solve the problem articulated by Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a recent interview in Financial Times, where he criticizes “the fact that engineers two cubicles apart send an e-mail rather than get up and talk. The whole nature of sitting down and hashing out ideas and collaborating is a bit stymied by the construct of the cubicles”. While other projects explore changes to the cubicle paradigm at Intel, they looked at a direct attack on the over-reliance of email, rather than tokenistically banning it.

“In our new pilot, we encourage the members of an organic group to focus each Friday on direct conversation – face to face or by telephone – for interpersonal communication within the group. Processing email from other groups is OK; sending email within the group is also OK – when it is necessary. But as much as possible, they will try to walk across the aisle or pick up the phone. While this may seem a small thing, experiments done in other companies showed a great impact once people started exploring communication with the human voice”. (http://blogs.intel.com/it/2007/10/quiet_time_on_track_no_email_d.php)

The US firm PBD launched a no email-Friday four months ago and have reported that it has been a massive success, with benefits including increased performance, happier customers and quicker problem solving. (http://www.pulsewebhosting.com/news/no-email-days-a-success/143/)

For me, anything that usefully gets people talking about email in a new and interesting way has got to be good in terms of helping to discuss and perfect the culture, but there are a couple of major flaws here.

Firstly, if people are using email badly on a Monday to Thursday, the fact that they are ‘allowed’ a day off doesn’t improve their usage more generally.

Secondly, they’ll still come back the following Monday to twice as many external emails, so on Monday will feel as if their email problem is worse than it really is!

For me, what I notice amongst the thousands of email inboxes I see are 2 very stark, very real facts, that about 98% of emailers have in common:

  1. The volume is not only too high now, but it’s rising, and people struggle to speed up their processing skills to avoid ending up sitting on a pile of hundreds of unread or un-dealt-with* emails (*’undealt-with’ us subtly but powerfully different from ‘unanswered’!)
  2. No one thinks the culture of their organization and its approach to email is perfect, and indeed everyone has ideas about how to improve it (and guess what, just to shake things up, sometimes the solutions of how to improve the culture are complete polar opposites too!)

So whilst ‘no email days’ are a great way of raising the issue of email culture and inviting feedback on what could be done about it, it’s hardly a sustainable solution.  The springboard onto better communication with employees about their needs? Maybe.

But also possibly the cause of significant stress in itself: consider the team of hard-pushed report-writers, desperate to gather information internally to hit a client’s ‘close of play Friday’ deadline.  Or the manager waiting to hear back on a vital decision that affects the future of his or her team.  We’d all be hard-pushed to refuse them special permission to jump ship and spend all day Friday frantically tapping into Outlook.  And then the flood gates open with many more conceivable and less than conceivable reasons to get out of the scheme, and whoever is running it finds themselves with an extra load of emails to deal with!

So, what else could you look at instead? 

  • Think about the stress that email is causing your teams. 
  • Start some conversations about this, perhaps at an away day or team meeting. 
  • As Peter Drucker famously said, “what gets measured gets managed” so look at getting some measurements in place to see the average levels of emails that colleagues are receiving, and also how much time they are spending (if you decide to survey them directly it’s likely they’ll underestimate both!
  • And importantly, as the BBC Money Programme on email concluded, invest in some training to increase email processing speeds, improve email culture and raise awareness about when not to rely on email at all.