Our philosophies on where and when you can work have changed pretty drastically in the last decade, but I’m not sure our digital communication policies have caught up.
I’m specifically talking about email. Or Slack. Or Microsoft Teams. Or that really questionable free IM service your boss made you download that caused your computer to start getting pop-up ads every time you moved your mouse even if your boss insists the two events are not correlated.
When you’re working from home, Gmail is your office. That’s it. It’s no longer an email service that supplements face-to-face interaction. It is interaction.
But I think a lot of corporate America still holds people accountable for email as if it was still a supplementary tool. That’s a really diplomatic way of saying a lot of people still suck at responding to emails, and as I’ve written about before, this has a tangible value on the efficiency of your workplace.
But you can’t just tell people “Respond faster” even if that’s exactly what I did in my last post on the topic. Telling people to respond faster at some point ends up looking like the “I Love Lucy” chocolate factory scene: if you’re getting 30 emails every hour, you're simply never going to be fast enough to thoughtfully address them all in a day, especially if you're sitting through six hours of Zoom calls.
I would love to see more companies start monitoring email deliveries more closely. Not actually reading the content of their employees' emails, but just seeing how many emails each of their employees is getting a day. I have to believe there's a sweet spot to how many emails a person can reasonably think about and address in one work day, and obviously that number depends on how detailed or sticky the emails are, but that number feels like it should be around 30 to me. A person can reasonably go about their to-do list and answer 3-4 emails each hour and not be too impeded. And if any employees are getting well above 30 a day (as I imagine is the case at a lot of companies), it should be a trigger for management to rethink what the flow of communication is on their team and why a single person is having to be involved in so many conversations. It probably signifies poor division of responsibilities or lack of clarity on who owns what, and that should be fixed.
On the other side of this, once a company gets to a point where the communication flow is better defined and everyone's inbox is manageable, I would love to see companies institute more specific expectations for email communication. Things like, "If an email requests your response, you will respond within 24 hours at least 90% of the time," or something. It'd probably cause more harm than good to implement some kind of audit system for this rule since it would probably just make people neurotic about their inbox to the point where it's counterproductive, but once you treat the problem at the source causing everyone's inboxes to be unmanageable, I think it's totally fair to lay out more stringent expectations and guidelines for how online communication will be conducted at a company.
And even if this policy did make people neurotic, it probably wouldn't be worse than occasionally waiting 96 hours to get a reply to a yes-or-no question in Gmail.
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