This past August, 4.3 million people quit their jobs. "The Great Resignation" has many people and pundits reasoning why. A lot of people are unhappy.
One of the most documented and researched reasons why people are unhappy at work is email. Email is always on, and the expectation is always to respond. Email is like a to-do list hot potato where everyone keeps tossing their stuff to do to someone else. Email is the ultimate dumping ground and laziest management tool ever invented!
In a successful business, a known process that is negatively impacting productivity is addressed and fixed. Usually, there is tangible data that identifies the inefficiencies. That same data source can be used to see if the fix worked.
Even though we have direct feedback from employees on how unhappy email makes them, we have difficulty calculating how unproductive they are because of email. If that email productivity calculation were readily available, every business would fire Outlook or Gmail!
We cannot replace email as a communication tool as we are not going back to the curly fax paper or snail mail. However, we can change how and with who we communicate using email. One step we can take to make employees happy again is to eliminate the majority of their daily emails. How do we do this? Only use email to communicate with external sources and no longer use email for internal communication.
Email is convenient for clients and vendors to communicate with your business, and that's what we want, less friction to do business with us. The majority of email employees receive each day is from other employees. Our internal communication will have more intent and purpose if our email inbox is used exclusively for external communication. We would intentionally create friction to slow down and reduce the communication volume for more thoughtful and meaningful communication and collaboration. Spending the day sending, forwarding, or CCing, more emails than anyone else, does not equate to more work. Managing employees with email blasts at all hours of the day does not make someone the hardest working manager in the company either.
Would employees be happier if their email volume were drastically reduced? Would they feel a lot less anxious about responding to their boss after hours or on weekends? Would everyone like to stop the "Reply all" madness? I think so.
What I think most employees will be happiest about is the ability to do real work. Most people like to feel like they accomplished something each day. Unfortunately, spending hours replying to emails does not give you that same feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day, thus feeling unsatisfied.
So how do you communicate internally if you cannot use email? Honestly, anything other than email will work better. Project management and collaboration software like Basecamp is a great solution. Chat tools like Slack are even worse than email because it is even easier to communicate and overwhelm everyone. So again, we want to intentionally create friction internally to create more thoughtful and meaningful communication and lessen the volume.
Changing the way we communicate and collaborate internally is a big undertaking. However, if it makes employees happier and more productive, why would we not want to change?
One of the most documented and researched reasons why people are unhappy at work is email. Email is always on, and the expectation is always to respond. Email is like a to-do list hot potato where everyone keeps tossing their stuff to do to someone else. Email is the ultimate dumping ground and laziest management tool ever invented!
In a successful business, a known process that is negatively impacting productivity is addressed and fixed. Usually, there is tangible data that identifies the inefficiencies. That same data source can be used to see if the fix worked.
Even though we have direct feedback from employees on how unhappy email makes them, we have difficulty calculating how unproductive they are because of email. If that email productivity calculation were readily available, every business would fire Outlook or Gmail!
We cannot replace email as a communication tool as we are not going back to the curly fax paper or snail mail. However, we can change how and with who we communicate using email. One step we can take to make employees happy again is to eliminate the majority of their daily emails. How do we do this? Only use email to communicate with external sources and no longer use email for internal communication.
Email is convenient for clients and vendors to communicate with your business, and that's what we want, less friction to do business with us. The majority of email employees receive each day is from other employees. Our internal communication will have more intent and purpose if our email inbox is used exclusively for external communication. We would intentionally create friction to slow down and reduce the communication volume for more thoughtful and meaningful communication and collaboration. Spending the day sending, forwarding, or CCing, more emails than anyone else, does not equate to more work. Managing employees with email blasts at all hours of the day does not make someone the hardest working manager in the company either.
Would employees be happier if their email volume were drastically reduced? Would they feel a lot less anxious about responding to their boss after hours or on weekends? Would everyone like to stop the "Reply all" madness? I think so.
What I think most employees will be happiest about is the ability to do real work. Most people like to feel like they accomplished something each day. Unfortunately, spending hours replying to emails does not give you that same feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day, thus feeling unsatisfied.
So how do you communicate internally if you cannot use email? Honestly, anything other than email will work better. Project management and collaboration software like Basecamp is a great solution. Chat tools like Slack are even worse than email because it is even easier to communicate and overwhelm everyone. So again, we want to intentionally create friction internally to create more thoughtful and meaningful communication and lessen the volume.
Changing the way we communicate and collaborate internally is a big undertaking. However, if it makes employees happier and more productive, why would we not want to change?