Are You Part of the Email Problem?

“If we email each other three times over the same issue, it’s time for one of us to pick up the phone.”

That sentence is posted at author and consultant Phil Simon’s website, on his page “Working With Me.” Simon also adds, at his website, “If you will only communicate by email, then probably we shouldn’t work together. Don’t get me wrong. Email is fine. I send many messages every day. But it’s only one form of communication; it is not the only one.”

Over-reliance on email is one of Simon’s pet peeves — so much so that he devotes much of his new book, Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It (Wiley, 2015), to it.

Email is a terrifically useful tool, but it suffers from significant limitations. “People already use email as a catch-all for personal communications, business communications, de facto project management, task management,” says Simon. It’s past time, he maintains, for businesses to shift many of those jobs out of email and into complementary tools such as Dropbox, Asana, Basecamp, HipChat, Jive, Yammer, and Slack. The result, he says, will be much better communication and far less wasted time.

Simon talked with Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane, an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Social Business Big Idea Initiative, about how organizations can cut back on email and its evil business communication twin, jargon.

Your new book is about what’s wrong with business communication and what companies can do to fix it. What is wrong with business communication today?

At a high level, there are two problems. Number one: we send far too much email. Number two: we use far too much jargon. That’s the book in a nutshell.

Let’s address the first issue. Email is killing us. Many employees receive 150 emails every day and those emails are frequently rife with jargon. It’s a pernicious combination. As such, employees are very unlikely to achieve what we’re trying to achieve on time. As my research uncovered, most employees are swamped with information and email.

Fortunately, change is well within our grasp. If I can improve my own skills, then anyone can. In the book, I cover my own communications journey. If I can email and speak in a way that people can understand, then anybody can.

Collaborative technologies have progressed to the point at which even small organizations can do amazing things for relatively small amounts of money — for relatively small amounts of money. Unless people understand that there’s a problem, however, they’re unlikely to do anything about it.

When you talk about people being overwhelmed by email, can you put that into a little bit of perspective, either in terms of numbers or what research shows? How do we know people are overwhelmed?

According to a Radicati study, the average person receives 121 emails each and every day. Now, if you work eight hours per day, an email arrives in your inbox about every four minutes. The Radicati study claims that the average employee spends 14 hours per week in email. Let’s say that you work 50 hours per week or 10 hours per day. That’s about 28% of your week in email.

Does that seem too high? Let’s say that you take one minute to process, read, and respond to each email. Do the math: that’s 150 minutes. That’s 2.5 hours per day, every day. All of a sudden, that number of 28% starts to ring true.

But here’s the rub: that number isn’t staying constant. It is increasing at 15% per year. Let’s do some more math. In about four and a half years, your inbox will have effectively doubled unless things change.

Let me state the obvious: This is not sustainable. Because employees receive so much email, they sometimes forget to do something they were supposed to do. More projects, deadlines and tasks will fall between the cracks.

I’m not anti-email, Jerry. You and I have emailed each other a few times over the last six months. Because of that, you have probably seen my email signature: “I abide by a three-email rule. After three, we talk.”

I am, however, anti-inefficiency. For instance, I am not managing a project or scheduling a meeting over email. It’s a waste of time. As I discuss in Message Not Received, email suffers from a number of significant limitations. The new technologies that I researched for the book make true collaboration possible without overwhelming workforces.

For scheduling purposes, what communication options are superior to email?

Quite a few. Five years ago, a client started emailing 10 people to schedule a meeting, including me. I thought to myself, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I started to see replies such as, “Thursday at 6:00 works for me but not Friday at 4:00.” The torrent didn’t stop. As expected, the thread got out of control really quickly. It was crazy.

I knew that there had to be a better way to crack this nut. I did a quick search for free online scheduling tools and found several that did the trick. For instance, Doodle.com (since retired) took about 20 seconds to set up a visual dashboard and invite people to vote on convenient times. That’s it. A child could have figured out a good time. Green meant good; red meant bad. There was no need for everyone to respond to everyone else on the email chain.

Many people refuse to embrace new like Calendar.ly, YouCanBook.Me, and scores of others. (The book contains a large table that presents different tools for different purposes.) As a result, they waste a tremendous amount of time. They wind up being overwhelmed and the whole cycle repeats itself. These tools are WYSIWYG.1 We’re not talking about a payroll or supply chain system. They are very intuitive. Employees need not attend formal training courses.

More generally, as I discuss in Message Not Received, there are hundreds of tools that obviate the need for superfluous emails. There’s simply no excuse for relying exclusively on email.

Let’s get a little more specific. What sort of technologies are out there and what problems do they solve in organizations?

Slack, HipChat, Smartsheet, and their ilk allow teams to easily set up groups, hashtags, conversations, and other useful communication vehicles. This obviates the need to search through 20,000 messages in individual inboxes in a vain attempt to find the right document.

Even on an individual level, it’s very easy to extricate yourself from email hell. I have started using Todoist, an online task-management app. It reminds me when I need to do something and minimizes the time I spend in my inbox. I’d like to get to a point at which I only check my email three, maybe four times every day. I’m not there yet, but that’s my goal.

No one tool can replace email, and the goal is not to kill email once and for all. The “one-tool” argument has contributed to today’s problem. People use email as a catch-all: personal communications, business communications, de facto project management, task management, and the like. In a perverse way, the status quo actually makes sense. When email is the epicenter of our lives, it’s logical to constantly check it, consequences be damned.

The problem, of course, is that we get distracted when we’re in our inboxes. For instance, if Jane checks her email for the status of a project, she often sees another unrelated but important email. Guess what? She’s derailed. Twenty minutes later, she forgets why she checked her email in the first place.

Where to begin? For starters, move away from a “one-size-fits-all” strategy. To that end, there are Web-based project management tools, like Asana and Basecamp, that can make it easy to manage a proper project. There are collaboration tools out there like Jive, Yammer, Smartsheet, Slack, and tons of others. They allow for true collaboration and knowledge discovery.

Talk about your own journey for a bit.

I look at my own behavior and, as I write in the book, I am a recovering email addict. I’ve spent more than two sleepless years of my life sending and receiving emails. To be sure, some of them have been useful, some of them have been necessary. However, other times I just responded to everyone on a chain because I felt compelled. That’s no longer the case.

What keeps people from moving away from email?

The answer is human, not technological. Perversely, many of us like that constant stream of messages.

Email confers status. We may complain about getting 150 emails every day, but secretly many employees like it. My friend Scott Berkun has called this “the cult of busy.” It’s natural to want to feel important at work.

This need to feel important taps into the same reason that so many Americans only take half of their allotted vacation time. When we’re out of the office, typically we’ll whip out our smart phones, lest we return with 1,000 unread messages.

I ask this question in the book: Why are we addicted to email? Maybe we’re concerned about being laid off, about not being important enough to be copied on every email.

And let’s not forget laziness and resistance to change. As I know from my consulting days, old habits die hard. I recently read a story about an executive who was 50 years old. Let’s call him Mike. He took a new job at a startup that embraced the collaborative tools I’ve mentioned.

Mike refused to use them. He relied upon email. As a result, his team didn’t know the status of different projects. Key employees couldn’t find essential content. When pressed, Mike said, “I don’t care about that. I just use email.” Mike soon left the company — and not on his own terms. The lesson here is that a new breed of companies exists.

I often get the question, “What if our employees refuse to use social media?” In response, I ask, “What if your employee said ‘I refuse to use email’ or ‘I refuse to use a cell phone’?

People hate change. Still, today it’s ridiculous to send somebody a 20-megabyte email attachment when WeTransfer, Dropbox, and box.net exist. It’s a cultural issue.

So where do you recommend the resisters start?

Play with some of the tools I mention in the book. Message Not Received is vendor-agnostic. I don’t pass judgment on Asana, Basecamp, and others. Anyone can try these applications in a very inexpensive manner. Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t possible. A CXO would have to sign a contract and buy a bunch of software. Only a year later could people actually use it. This is no longer the case.

Would you recommend that an enterprise that wants to spread this culture encourage their employees to experiment and encourage their employees to experiment and try new tools?

Yes. As consumers, it’s never been easier. Hundreds of millions of us use Dropbox, Facebook, Snapchat, texting, Skype, and other tools to communicate with each other as citizens and consumers. Why do we resist change at work?

We live in an era of bring your own device (BYOD), cloud computing, mobile devices, and the freemium business model. Why not see what takes root in your organization? Things can develop organically, not simply in a top-down manner.

Is this shift happening in large companies, or is this more of a small company phenomenon?

It’s happening everywhere, but smaller companies suffer from less cultural and technological baggage than their larger counterparts. It’s a key emphasis of my third book, The New Small. Of course, there are progressive groups in mature, stodgy organizations. Startups are already embracing the tools in the book, but it’s easier: they’re greenfield sites.

If you were in charge, a CEO of a pretty big company and recognizing this problem, what would you do for the organization to drive change in that culture?

I’d start with data and I’d take a look at who is sending the most email. Which departments and individuals are the biggest culprits? I’d place a one-cent payroll tax on all emails. I’d encourage people to use new tools and actually talk to one another via their paychecks.

CEOs in many ways are insulated from many communication issues. They may not even realize that their companies are suffering from massive problems.

Recently I came across a group that was trying to reduce email. They found that one of the culprits was their practice of replying “thank you” to certain types of email. That was going to change. Our use of communication tools could change many behavioral norms, which in turn could cause lots of unexpected challenges.

Technology has always changed cultural norms. When the typewriter was invented, people were really irritated. The machine was really noisy and people wouldn’t see the personalization of the sender’s penmanship. If you want to find out more on this, look at A Better Pencil by Dennis Baron. Technology has always challenged cultural norms. I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.

We’ve talked a great deal about email, but let’s discuss jargon, another focus of Message Not Received. Do you think companies or cultures use language as a sort of being part of a club, like a test to see if you know?

To some extent, sure. As Albert Einstein once famously said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” This should be in the lobby of every office in the country.

Business isn’t a science. There are no immutable laws of management. Many executives bastardize the language, and it’s natural for underlings to ape the words and expressions of their superiors. There’s no reason to make things unnecessarily complicated. Period.