How to be an email trailblazer
Almost every corporate organisation that I work with has the same three problems:
No sense of belonging (to each other or the organisation)
Too many emails
Too many meetings
The first one is solved by bringing people together for a day or two and taking them through a structured exercise to agree what belonging looks like for them. However, the other two require people to make different choices and that’s where the problems start.
Swimming against the tide of existing cultural norms is a hard thing to do, particularly when the pressure to conform to ‘the way we do things around here’ is so strong. However, just because it’s established doesn’t mean that it always has to be that way. Especially if the alternative is so much better!
Of course, email can be an important tool for communication, however, it is misused by so many people that its importance is watered down to the point of being ineffective. Yet the popularity of email continues. Researchers Radicati estimate that there will be half a billion more users of email in 2024 than there were in 2023 and that by the end of 2027 the number of emails sent will grow to over 400 billion.
The crux of the email problem is that people are rarely trained on how to use it. No agreements are made on how and when it should be used or else people just aren’t very good at writing them (as evidenced by the director of the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy last year).
Instead, employees fall into the Pavlovian behaviour demonstrated by those around them. What Ivan Petrovich Pavlov found - through his cruel tests on dogs - was that introducing a stimulus (in the dogs’ case, a bell) repeatedly before feeding, conditioned the animal to salivate at the sound of the bell, not the food.
We are now trapped in these same Pavlovian patterns - as evidenced in this scene from the US version of The Office. It has, of course, been exacerbated by email notifications on our phones.
The conditioned reflex for many people when they hear an email notification is to immediately check their phone. Indeed, in his book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, author Adam Alter found that 70% of people responded to their phones every six seconds.
Another piece of research found that people unlocked their phones 60 times per day for at least 3-4 minutes (no longer) each time, not including tablets, laptops or any other technology.
I observed it myself recently. A phone was on the desk in front of a person who was in a conversation with two other people. An email notification sounded, the person lifted their phone, unlocked it, swiped down, read the 1-2 line summary of the email, opened the email app (briefly to see what else was in there), then locked their phone and put it back in front of them. They then asked the people they were with to repeat what they’d just said.
This makes deep work (i.e. flow states) impossible and it can take up to 16 minutes to refocus once you’ve allowed your concentration to wane. But here’s the good news, it doesn’t have to be this way, you (and other people like you who are sick of email) can do something about it and become an email trailblazer in your organisation.
And - more good news - it only needs about 15% of the workforce to challenge a cultural norm and do something different (and stick to it) to affect change. It’s something I see all the time in my work helping teams build vibrant cultures. One organisation even managed to halve the number of emails sent/received in just four weeks, because 100 people (20% of the total workforce) decided to break the cycle.
So, what did they do that you can copy, and become a trailblazer in your organisation? Here’s a list, starting with the most important things first:
Accept that the habit is bad for your mental health and productive time
Accept that you’re going to be different from everyone else
Be unapologetic for doing things differently
Be clear to people how they should communicate with you and, as a team, agree what you’ll do differently
Recognise that email is an asynchronous tool and as such never demands an instant response. If something is urgent, someone will phone you
Uninstall the email app from your phone. If you can’t do it, then ask your IT department to do it for you or else just disable it. Email will become a ‘desktop’ only application - this has the added benefit of meaning that you won’t be tempted to check the app (and return to the previous conditioning) when on holiday
Turn off all email notifications. All of them, everywhere. Notifications seek only to drag your attention back to the application and disrupt your flow
Resolve to use shared documents and send links via message/email rather than attachments
Take pride in having as few emails in your inbox as possible, not the opposite. Having lots of outstanding emails is a sign that you’re disorganised, not that you’re important.
Of course, most of these seem fairly obvious things to do, yet they are practised consistently by so few people. So if you want to become an email trailblazer in your organisation, then apply these steps and break the cycle so that others can follow suit and change the email culture, forever. The next generation of workers will thank you for it.
The Culture Blueprint
Are you looking to turn positive cultural intention into demonstrable results? Every year, Colin works with a small number of organisations around the world to help them do just that.
Contact Jules at hello@colindellis.com to arrange a free, no commitment, 40-minute call with Colin and we’ll produce a blueprint for you on the work you need to do to fill your culture gaps.