In 2017, a French labour law was brought into effect that attempted to preserve the right to disconnect at work. Companies with 50 or more employees were required to negotiate policies about the use of e-mail after work hours, with the goal of reducing the time worked in evenings and at the weekend. The government at the time in part justified the new law as a necessary step to reduce burnout.
Now for anyone who has worked with French labour laws, you’ll appreciate the enhanced political and working council challenges that align with such a law being put into effect. That said, but it is a poignant political step. The research and advice that influenced this decision screams one thing and one thing only to me, email is making us miserable.
And when you dig into the research on this topic further, a psychological study from 2019 looked at health trends in a group of c.5,000 Swedish workers. The findings were pretty powerful. Repeated exposure to “high information and communication technology demands” (or in layman's terms, constant connection at work) were associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for potential complicating factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, health behavior, body-mass index, job strain, and social support. So we can’t even argue that it was because one sex, age group, health condition or anything else made a stark difference.
I don’t really need a huge amount more data to prove this point. I’m sure you all feel it poignantly too.
I have just come back off a short break (6 working days) and opened my inbox to over 500 emails. Don’t get me wrong, once I waded through I found the majority were either junk, newsletters, already actioned or simply for my information, but the sheer overload of data I had to take in over a very short period when my brain had already been struggling to switch on after a really restful time quickly removed any relaxation I had gained over that period of time. I dread to think what would have happened if I had taken even more time off over a busier period — this was during the summer holidays!
How many of you wake up every morning, particularly those of you working with colleagues over the pond or in Asia, to find emails have come in at 2am, 3am, 4am and beyond… What does it make you feel when you see them? I have a terrible habit of waking every morning and the second thing I check after my text messages and WhatsApp's is my work inbox. It hardly allows me to slowly wake to the day, be mindful, check in with my intentions and ensure I am focused on the things that matter. Instead I flurry through them, quickly actioning, and feeding the wheel more.
I reflected after my first day back that in those 500 emails, I must have sent about 100 back to different colleagues and consultants. I am feeding the cycle. We are little hamsters in a cage trying to escape the email hole we have found ourselves in and cannot get out. Alice through the looking glass…
Matthew Lieberman, the psychologist, suggests in his recent book that the social networks encoded in our neurons are linked to our pain systems. This creates a feeling similar to the heartbreak we feel when someone close to us dies or the total desolation that we might experience when we are isolated from other people for too long.
Remember the pandemic? What did you do to reach out to your colleagues and your friends during those days of isolation? You didn’t spend hours drafting emails with actions. You got on the phone. You did video calls. You heard and saw voices. Made it as human and personal as possible. You tried anything to ensure you had as much of a human connection as you possibly could without it being the real deal of face to face. Social distancing was not resolved by email.
Why then, are organisations continuing to use this method of connection and communication when actually as human beings out of work we are very rarely connecting with others in this method and when we do, something is telling us we must keep doing it or we will get hurt in some way.
The flip side of an evolutionary obsession with social interaction is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s taken away — like food, if we don’t eat it we feel hungry and anxious. When you skip a meal, telling your rumbling stomach that food is coming later in the day, and therefore that it has no reason to fear starvation, doesn’t take the powerful sensation of hunger away. And for those of you who have read some of my other posts (check out chapter 5), I probably know this more than many.
Similarly, someone at work said to me the other day, “my emails are very quiet, I feel like something bad is happening”. We want to feel connected and when the thing we have used for over 10 years to connect to each other and feel like we belong at work is taken away, we feel like something is wrong. Of course this is anecdotal, but I’m sure this will resonate with many of you.
How many times have you had a colleague email you from across the desk? How many times have you heard people complain “why couldn’t they just talk to me”. It is making is unhuman through our direct and sometimes intentional disconnection.
So what can organisations do to resolve this? Of course the first challenge is trying to find another channel to engage with people. One that people actually want to use and engage with. I always use the twitter analogy. Twitter is the most powerful anonymous forum for people to share their views, but it would be useless and died years ago if no one wanted to use it. So first find a channel or software that as much as possible tries to capture the human experience of being face to face.
The Blue Man Group’s work had it spot on. For those of you who didn’t see the phenomenal show c.15 years ago when it burst onto the scene, the BLUE MAN GROUP performances are euphoric celebrations of human connection through art, music, comedy, and non-verbal communication. They show the irony of the disconnected human and I personally remember a scene of two ‘blue men’ sitting in the same room, just writing emails to each other. Of course the point of the scene was to show the lack of human connection through the screen, when if they could just stand up and talk to each other, they would no doubt have flourished far more as individuals and as a new-found relationship blossoming.
What can you do as an organisation to enable this? Well I’ve seen some amazing things work recently.
Slack is booming across many firms so won’t be a surprise to many of you but is a beautiful way of creating channels personal to groups as well as collective conversation just like a chat function. It requires people to engage in it, but doesn’t email? It’s highly customisable for teams too — unlike email which ultimately has very little functionality. AND it integrates with so many other systems so for ease of employee working experience, it really does enhance that beautifully.
The second app I’ve used recently is Clockwise. While it’s not an entire replacement for email, it does allow teams to show their availability collectively, to ensure there isn’t the twoing and frowing of “can you make this time”, “so and so can’t do this time so can we do this one instead” that you see on emails and then the multiple diary invites that follow. It also allows you to through the click of a button schedule things for yourself without having to go into the outlook functionality of doing it yourself. Really small micro-actions that enable you to be more productive and not get bogged down in the technology itself, which, of course, as we’ve all experienced with email, can be half the battle sometimes!
On a more behavioural level, we have seen in the news organisations implementing things like “email free Fridays”. For deep work. To properly find flow in the work that you do, sometimes turning off the systems can really help. While this doesn’t resolve the email issue in its entirely, nor find another solution to replace it, it does give a little respite.
I also think another simple solution is how as an organisation you provide information and connection to your employees as leaders. How many times have you seen the company ‘newsletter’ and quickly deleted it because it’s just another email to read? How many times have you deleted the notification of a new update in a work system without actually engaging in it? There has to be a more human way of listening to and connecting with employees. It is so easy to hide behind the corporate face of an email, just like the individual across the office floor does to another.
We get our news and broader worldly updates from apps and channels. If something is exploding in the news, the first place I look is Twitter. When 9/11 happened 20 years ago (almost to the day), the news broadcast and videography of the event became critical evidence for the law cases and ultimately 20 year war (the longest in US history) that followed. Go and ask 5 of your friends how they get updates on the news — I’d bet quite a lot of money none of them are going to say email.
So let’s think about how we communicate with our people in organisations. How do we make it the same kind of experience as amazon contacting you to tell you your parcel is on its way. Sky news telling you the breaking news of the hour. Instagram telling you a friend has liked your photo…
I realise I don’t have all the solutions and the technology world surrounding this is busy and hard to see through at times. But I also believe it is iterative; trial and error. Just like organisation design should be. Amazon didn’t design an app and never update it. As organisations, we have relied on the same system of email to connect to our people for so long and haven’t really updated the way we connect with our people along with the times. I generalise, I’m sure some of you have, but I’d still challenge most organisations to test what the main ‘formal’ way to communicate is and test how often email is still being used.
So my advice? Go and explore the world out there. Partner with your tech teams, take little pilot groups. Find a small community within the organisation with a shared purpose and see if it flies. Adapt and change it for what they need. Different communities might need different things. But as long as the software or channel as the ability to adapt and iterate with you, why not keep trying. Community managers at the huge social channels such as Twitter and Reddit make a very good living out of this sort of thing — I highly recommend listening to the podcast series by David Spinks called Masters of Community(you can find it on Spotify) and a particular episode with Evan Hamilton on how reddit builds trust at scale. I won’t spoil it, other than to say there are a lot of lessons organisations can take from this.
Perhaps the sheer irony of this post is I have in the past won joke awards at employee away days for sending the most emails. I am a victim of this and I am fueling the system. Anyone that works with me closely will be chuckling as they read this.
But I will be making a conscious effort going forwards. I don’t have the channel to stop it altogether, but there has to be a better way of connecting and getting the message across without the need to send the email. So here’s me saying I’m going to try. Wish me luck.
Because frankly I’d love to see what my cortisol levels were after I opened my emails on Monday morning.
