Last week I appeared on the BBC’s Money Programme – which was entitled “Email is ruining my life!” Is email ruining your life? Or is that a difficult question because in some respects it makes things so much easier, but in others it makes things more stressful?
The stimulus for the show was startling new facts about the level of email usage in the UK and also the effects it is now having on both businesses and workers. For example, it is estimated that more than two million e-mails are sent every single minute in the UK – that’s almost three billion emails per day! When you think about the number of emailers across the world the total is almost inconceivable. This was certainly not a situation that the inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, envisaged when he sent the first electronic message between two computers in 1971!!
Yes, there are upsides to email, but there are also costs – both in terms of productivity and stress. The BBC reported that one FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year and another recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.
When I was asked to comment as part of the BBC programme, the point I made was that e-mail can be a major source of employee anxiety and that we need to give employees support to help them use it in a balanced, effective way.
It isn’t just the number of e-mails that fly around, but also the fact that they are often badly written and misused that causes the problems. Emails can be a very lazy form of communication that provides us with a potential ‘get-out’ to avoid those awkward one-to-one conversations. The fact is that some conversations just have to be face-to-face and some things simply can’t be conveyed via the relatively sterile medium of email.
Imagine the difference between how a request to work at the weekend on a key project would be received if it was transmitted by email compared with a personal approach. In the case of the latter the manager gets the opportunity to show appreciation and how important it is to the firm through all manner of social cues. With email, it’s an impersonal request relayed by a machine. Result – the manager abdicates responsibility and employee feels put upon, stressed out and de-motivated.
Work culture is now 24/7 - mobile phones, Blackberry’s and e-mail all mean that many of us are ‘on call’ all the time. But we have to make good personal decisions about how we use these tools. At the same time, employers can help by being clear about their expectations and not taking advantage of the unprecedented level of connectivity that is now possible.
Click here for the link to the full article on the BBC – including tips for managing email more effectively. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7281707.stm
March 21, 2008 at 9:52 am
I agree that email is a big problem and you are right that we get lazy. In my last management job I chose not to send any internal emails or make any internal phone calls on a Friday. I used to walk around the building and talk to people instead. Remember that? As a result I could get almost anyone to do anything for me because I knew them personally.
Although there is a need for employers to support staff, there is also the persoanl responsibility of how we use it ourselves. Added to that the pressure could be relived by greater use of messaging software within organisations. many emails are conversational and these could easily be shifted to a messaging environment.
Its also important for the IT side of the management to be responsible. My hosting compnay has just put in a new filter and reduced my spam from 100 per day to 10. That makes the job of dealing with email much easier. Even if your spam is going directly into a junk email filter you still need to check for false negatives.
Sue Hewitt
April 4, 2008 at 7:43 pm
I think we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg here. When were we ever taught to use e-mail effectively? Can you imagine if we had learnt to drive this way? There would be a public outcry.
Today’s employees have slew of ways to communicate: face to face, phone, e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing… Knowing which to use, and when and how to use it, surely isn’t something that should be left up to chance?