How to address email ghosting
Email Ghosting is a modern problem for corporate employees. It’s easy to blame the tool used to deliver the message that will never get read, however, there are five root causes as to why people ghost each other on email:
People don’t understand how to use email - I know, it seems ridiculous, however, organisations don’t sit people down at their induction and say ‘this is the tool we use for email, this is how we use it, this is the functionality available to you and these are the rules’. Instead existing cultural norms are adhered to and the problem of email use worsens leading to…
People get emails that are of no interest - copying people in unnecessarily is the worst culprit here (although see point 4) however there is a real lack of empathy when it comes to email. This is often compounded by a lack of psychological safety in the organisation that leads people to use email to cover their backs. But mainly, people aren’t thinking about who needs to see an email, leading to a scattergun approach where everyone gets copied in. This is because…
There’s no agreement on how to communicate - teams don’t sit down at the start of the year and agree ‘this communication will be done by email, this will be done verbally, whilst this is a Teams message’ etc. This communication planning is key in ensuring that people’s attention isn’t overwhelmed with the wrong kind of communication. This is made worse by the fact that…
Some people are disorganised or like to micromanage - it would be remiss not to include this. Some people are just really bad at managing their time and consequently have inboxes full of messages that they will never get around to. Whilst some managers insist on being copied into everything. These people often blame others for sending emails that they asked to be copied in to or are unable to use the filters the tool provides (see point 1)! Which is also an example of the fact that…
Some people are rude - this is last on the list as I want to believe the best in people, yet I know for a fact, that there are some people who will routinely ignore communications that they’ve been asked to respond to for no other reason than their behaviour and/or communication skills are poor. You know who these people are, they just don’t see it themselves.
As with all bad cultural habits, if enough people want to change it, you can do, in a relatively short space of time. One team (of 150 people) that I worked with reduced the number of emails sent by a third in just one month, so if they can do it, you can do it too. You can do it in your team today if you make it a priority. Which one of the root causes will you tackle first?
