Ban Email?

By James Krouse on March 4, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Featured, Technology, Workplace

So let’s ban email.  But before we do, let’s talk about something else: auditing emails.  I know, the phrase has a terrifying ring.  No one likes anything audited and email can be highly personal, but Michael Schrage thinks that it’s a good mechanism to improve productivity.  No, we’re not talking about policing someone’s email looking for wasted time.  Here’s what he’s proposing:

Because the rhythm and rhetoric of effective email exchange is a critical success factor in business performance, mismanagement of email may in fact be a symptom of other weaknesses in your organization.

But no executive has the time (or obsessive-compulsive disorder) to review and edit their people’s correspondence — it’s not possible and it wouldn’t be healthy. So how can managers quickly and cheaply create the shock of self-consciousness to push their people to take the style and substance of their correspondence more seriously? And how can you find out the interoffice spam actually reflects a deeper issue of employee performance?

I’ve found that the most powerful approach is also the simplest: make email an intrinsic part of performance reviews. Insist that colleagues and subordinates better evaluate their email so that you may better evaluate their performance. There are few better proxies for assessing how well individuals are communicating, on task and on target, than the digital missives they send in order to get their work done.

Email can be a frustrating train of cc’s that mean nothing to most of the people being cc’d.  The important stuff gets lost and the unimportant stuff just wastes time.  This proposal is a good one, but only if a manager is not part of the problem.  Often managers demand to be ‘in the loop’ so much that they cultivate a CYA culture.  In other words, if I hit cc to everyone in the office including my boss or bosses, I can’t be blamed for something going wrong.

In addition, managers often blast out emails to a vague group of people or cc people on a ‘team’ with no real thought to who really needs to read the message.  So how do you really get to the heart of an email inefficiency problem.  Job reviews might be a way for individuals to change, but that won’t quickly change the culture of your organization.

So here’s a tip direct from the Job Shopper: take away email for a week.  Ban it.  OK, don’t ban it.  That’s ridiculous.  We all have people we need to communicate with quickly.  But encourage your office not to use it unless it’s necessary.  Absolutely necessary.  At the end of the week, have a discussion to see what alternatives people found.  Is it possible that 25 cc’d messages were less productive that 1 short meeting?  Is it possible that people had more time to concentrate on the things that really matter?

The irony here is that when email and the Internet first entered our office, the quesiton was how to stop innappropriate use of the technology which would waste time.  Today, appropriate use of the technology is actually the big time waster.  So ban it. For a week.  Then talk about what went wrong and what went right.  It’s possible that more went right than wrong and that you’re whole office may learn how to use the technology more effectively.

You can read the rest of Michael Schrage’s blog post here at the Harvard Business Review Blog