End the Tyranny of 24/7 Email
By CLIVE THOMPSONAUG. 28, 2014 NY Times
THIS Labor Day weekend, odds are you’ll peek at your work
email on your “day off” — and then feel guilty about it.
You might envy
the serene workers at Daimler, the German automaker. On vacations, employees
can set their corporate email to “holiday mode.” Anyone who emails them gets an
auto-reply saying the employee isn’t in, and offering contact details for an
alternate, on-call staff person. Then poof, the incoming email is deleted — so
that employees don’t have to return to inboxes engorged with digital missives
in their absence. “The idea behind it is to give people a break and let them
rest,” a Daimler spokesman told
Time magazine. “Then they can come back to work with a fresh spirit.”
Limiting
workplace email seems radical, but it’s a trend in Germany, where Volkswagen
and Deutsche Telekom have adopted policies that limit work-related email to
some employees on evenings and weekends. If this can happen in precision-mad,
high-productivity Germany, could it happen in the United States? Absolutely. It
not only could, but it should.
White-collar
cubicle dwellers complain about email for good reason. They spend 28 percent of
their workweek slogging through the stuff, according to the McKinsey
Global Institute. They check their messages 74 times a day, on average,
according to Gloria Mark,
an authority on workplace behavior and a professor at the University of
California, Irvine.
And lots of
that checking happens at home. Jennifer Deal, a senior research scientist at
the Center for Creative Leadership, surveyed smartphone-using white-collar
workers and found that most were umbilically tied to email a stunning 13.5 hours a
day, well into the evening. Workers don’t even take a break during
dinner — where, other research shows, fully 38 percent
check work email “routinely,” peeking at the phone under the table. Half check
it in bed in the morning. What agonizes workers is the expectation that they’ll
reply instantly to a colleague or boss, no matter how ungodly the hour. Hence
the endless, neurotic checking, and the dread of getting in trouble for
ignoring something.
So as a matter
of sheer human decency and workplace fairness, reducing the chokehold of
after-hours email is a laudable goal.
But it also
appears that, from a corporate standpoint, the sky won’t fall. The few North
American firms that have emulated Daimler all say it is surprisingly
manageable.
At the Toronto
office of Edelman, the global public relations firm, managers created the
“7-to-7” rule. Employees are strongly discouraged from emailing one another
before 7 a.m. and after 7 p.m. Sure, they can check email if they want — but
they’re not to send it to colleagues. It’s an acknowledgment that the only way
to really reduce email is to persuade colleagues not to reflexively write every
time they have the tiniest question.
Those who do
are scolded. “You have to stick to it,” Lisa Kimmel, the general manager of the
office, told me. “When we tell prospective employees about it, their eyes light
up.”
Even start-ups
are experimenting with email limits. Book Riot, a website for book lovers, has
eight full-time employees who mostly work remotely, in different time zones, on
often hectic schedules. They all agree: Email someone whenever you want, but
don’t expect a reply until the recipient is back in the office.
“It’s
understood that if someone has a crazy idea at 3 a.m. and sends it, that’s
their problem that it’s 3 a.m. — you respond when you want,” Rebecca Schinsky,
the site’s director of content, told me. At the Boston Consulting Group, when a
team of stressed-out consultants began organizing “predictable time off” —
no-messaging zones during their off time — their total work hours dropped by 11
percent, yet the same amount of work was accomplished.
Why would less
email mean better productivity? Because, as Ms. Deal found in her research,
endless email is an enabler. It often masks terrible management practices.
When employees
shoot out a fusillade of miniature questions via email, or “cc” every team
member about each niggling little decision, it’s because they don’t feel
confident to make a decision on their own. Often, Ms. Deal found, they’re
worried about getting in trouble or downsized if they mess up.
In contrast,
when employees are actually empowered, they make more judgment calls on their
own. They also start using phone calls and face-to-face chats to resolve issues
quickly, so they don’t metastasize into email threads the length of “War and
Peace.”
This is basic
behavioral economics. When email is seen as an infinite resource, people abuse
it. If a corporation constrains its use, each message becomes more valuable —
and employees become more mindful of how and when they write.
Granted, not
all late-night email is bad. As Ms. Deal found, employees don’t like being
forced to reply at 1 a.m., but they appreciate the flexibility of being able to
shift some work to the evening if they choose. And they don’t mind dealing with
genuine work crises that crop up during leisure hours. At Edelman in Toronto,
employees try not to bug each other in the evenings — but if a client emails
with a time-sensitive issue, they’ll respond.
These changes can’t
happen through personal behavior: The policy needs to come from the top. (If
your boss regularly emails you a high-priority question at 11 p.m., the real
message is, “At our company, we do email at midnight.”) And some changes may
seem like matters of housekeeping, but have major repercussions, like keeping a
separate email box for your personal messages. You can’t ignore your work inbox
if that’s also the place where friends send you weepy accounts of their
breakups.
But it’s worth
it. More than a century ago, blue-collar workers fought for a limited workday
with an activist anthem: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight
hours for what we will.” It’s a heritage that, this Labor Day, we need to
restore.
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In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.
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