Is email ruining the modern workplace?
Email overload is having a serious impact on our productivity and well-being. Is there a solution?
I check email way too often.
Each month, I receive an email from Microsoft Viva that shows trends in my work patterns as a public affairs advisor at a major research-intensive university in Canada.
Over the past few months, Microsoft Viva has been sending me a pretty clear message: I check email way too often.
These are the top recommendations I received from Microsoft last month:
During working hours, you read over 75% of your emails within 30 minutes of receiving them. To maximize focus, try checking your inbox once an hour.
It looks like you read and respond to email quickly outside your working hours. Consider turning off email notifications outside working hours.
I wanted to understand the causes and consequences of my frantic email-checking habit, so I did some research.
Turns out, I’m not alone. And the consequences of this email-checking habit appear to be more dire than one might initially think.
We are all obsessed with email.
The statistics on email use in the workplace tell a clear story: we are all obsessed with email.
Knowledge workers check their inboxes an average of 77 times a day, with some checking more than 400 times daily
Knowledge workers check email or instant messenger apps once every six minutes on average
A survey by Adobe found that knowledge workers spend over three hours on average checking work email, with the 25-34 age group spending a whopping 6.4 hours per day
Introducing: The Hyperactive Hive Mind
In his book “A World Without Email,” Cal Newport argues that email has ushered in a new kind of work which he calls the Hyperactive Hive Mind:
A workflow centred around ongoing conversation fueled by unstructured and unscheduled messages delivered through digital communication tools like email and instant messenger services.
So, what’s the problem with email?
Well, there’s several. Cal Newport outlines three that are worth considering:
1. Email reduces productivity
Simply put, humans were not built to multitask. Switching focus between tasks (like quickly responding to that email while trying to write your strategic report) is mentally taxing and slows down your mental processing. In fact, it takes 23 minutes on average to refocus after an interruption. How can you possibly expect to complete any task that requires sustained focus if you’re checking your email intermittently at the same time?
2. Email makes us miserable
Humans are wired for social connection. Because of this, it is natural for us to feel anxious and stressed if we neglect an email from someone in our network who needs something from us. Add to this the blurred lines between home and work as well as the fact that almost every knowledge worker has access to work devices at all times of the day. It’s no wonder that so many of us feel the need to respond to emails after work hours. This isn’t good for anyone. Research clearly demonstrates that after hour work emails cause stress, and stressed employees don’t perform well at work.
3. Email has a mind of its own
There is a theory called technological determinism which says that technology can shape a society’s structure and values. Adopting this view, Cal Newport argues that the rapid spread of email throughout organizations in the 1990s ushered in the era of the Hyperactive Hive Mind. In other words, it wasn’t a conscious decision for us to adopt the Hyperactive Hive Mind workflow. Rather, it chose us. It was an inevitable outcome of the invention of email.
Can public policy help solve this problem?
To their credit, governments around the world are taking notice of the negative impacts of our “always on” society.
In 2017, France introduced a Right to Disconnect Law and several other countries followed suit thereafter, including Italy, Spain, and Ireland.
In Canada, Ontario is the only province to introduce similar legislation. Bill 27, introduced in 2021, requires employers with 25 or more people to have a policy that outlines how they will ensure workers are able to disconnect from the workplace after hours.
Some critics argue, however, that these laws do not address the real problems with work, and employers should instead give workers more autonomy to determine their availability.
If public policy isn’t the answer, then what is?
Ope Akanbi, Assistant Professor, Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University, argues that we need a cultural shift to solve this problem:
The right to disconnect can be the catalyst an organization needs to review its policies. However, a cultural shift that destigmatizes a less frenetic pace of work and allows employees more control over their work boundaries will more directly address the problem of overwork.
I would agree with this assessment. But how might we achieve this cultural shift, you ask?
Well, remember our earlier discussion about technological determinism? I often wonder to myself: if email got us into this mess, can some new piece of technology get us out?
Take, for argument’s sake, Web3.
Web3’s potential to solve the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
Steve Glaveski wrote a fascinating article in the Harvard Business Review looking at how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) could change the way we work. DAOs are organizations that use blockchain technology to allow for distributed governance and ownership amongst large networks of individuals.
Glaveski makes the case that DAOs could offer several benefits to employees in the future, including increased autonomy, freedom to do more fulfilling work, more decision-making power, different compensation structures, and flexibility to work from anywhere.
This may all sound promising, but we should take great care to study the impacts of these new ways of working before they become widely adopted. This could help us avoid new workflows that are just as bad, if not worse, than the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
So, what’s the takeaway here?
Solving the problem of an “always on” work culture is, in many ways, the challenge of our generation.
Currently, workplace stress is estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $500 billion dollars and some reports have shown that more than half of employees are feeling burned out. Think of the benefits to society if we were able to foster a truly healthy and productive workforce.
Addressing this issue will require collaboration between businesses, governments, and employees. Not only must we explore potential policy solutions to today’s challenges, but we must identify and consider the technologies of tomorrow that could drastically transform our current workflows. This will be key to building a healthy and prosperous workforce in the future.
Stay in touch with me!
Interested in the intersection of public policy and digital technology? Subscribe for more articles like this in the future by clicking below:
Where else you can find me:
Very interesting read! While some organizations have room for employee autonomy around email use many are antiquated with the expectation that you are always "on." I hope we slowly move in the other direction and find more productive ways to stay in touch.
I’m a software developer. I took the past week off. I was completely disconnected. It wasn’t hard. I just had to choose to do it.