End the Tyranny of 24/7 Email
By CLIVE THOMPSON AUG. 28, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/29/opinion/end-the-tyranny-of-24-7-email.html
THIS Labor Day weekend, odds are you’ll peek at your work email on your “day
off” — and then feel guilty about it.
You might envy the serene workers at Daimler, the German automaker. On
vacations, employees can set their corporate email to “holiday mode.” Anyone
who emails them gets an auto-reply saying the employee isn’t in, and offering
contact details for an alternate, on-call staff person. Then poof, the incoming
email is deleted — so that employees don’t have to return to inboxes engorged
with digital missives in their absence. “The idea behind it is to give people a
break and let them rest,” a Daimler spokesman told Time magazine. “Then they
can come back to work with a fresh spirit.”
Limiting workplace email seems radical, but it’s a trend in Germany, where
Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom have adopted policies that limit work-related
email to some employees on evenings and weekends. If this can happen in
precision-mad, high-productivity Germany, could it happen in the United States?
Absolutely. It not only could, but it should.
White-collar cubicle dwellers complain about email for good reason. They spend
28 percent of their workweek slogging through the stuff, according to the
McKinsey Global Institute. They check their messages 74 times a day, on
average, according to Gloria Mark, an authority on workplace behavior and a
professor at the University of California, Irvine.
And lots of that checking happens at home. Jennifer Deal, a senior research
scientist at the Center for Creative Leadership, surveyed smartphone-using
white-collar workers and found that most were umbilically tied to email a
stunning 13.5 hours a day, well into the evening. Workers don’t even take a
break during dinner — where, other research shows, fully 38 percent check work
email “routinely,” peeking at the phone under the table. Half check it in bed
in the morning. What agonizes workers is the expectation that they’ll reply
instantly to a colleague or boss, no matter how ungodly the hour. Hence the
endless, neurotic checking, and the dread of getting in trouble for ignoring
something.
So as a matter of sheer human decency and workplace fairness, reducing the
chokehold of after-hours email is a laudable goal.
But it also appears that, from a corporate standpoint, the sky won’t fall. The
few North American firms that have emulated Daimler all say it is surprisingly
manageable.
At the Toronto office of Edelman, the global public relations firm, managers
created the “7-to-7” rule. Employees are strongly discouraged from emailing one
another before 7 a.m. and after 7 p.m. Sure, they can check email if they want
— but they’re not to send it to colleagues. It’s an acknowledgment that the
only way to really reduce email is to persuade colleagues not to reflexively
write every time they have the tiniest question.
Those who do are scolded. “You have to stick to it,” Lisa Kimmel, the general
manager of the office, told me. “When we tell prospective employees about it,
their eyes light up.”
Even start-ups are experimenting with email limits. Book Riot, a website for
book lovers, has eight full-time employees who mostly work remotely, in
different time zones, on often hectic schedules. They all agree: Email someone
whenever you want, but don’t expect a reply until the recipient is back in the
office.
“It’s understood that if someone has a crazy idea at 3 a.m. and sends it,
that’s their problem that it’s 3 a.m. — you respond when you want,” Rebecca
Schinsky, the site’s director of content, told me. At the Boston Consulting
Group, when a team of stressed-out consultants began organizing “predictable
time off” — no-messaging zones during their off time — their total work hours
dropped by 11 percent, yet the same amount of work was accomplished.
Why would less email mean better productivity? Because, as Ms. Deal found in
her research, endless email is an enabler. It often masks terrible management
practices.
When employees shoot out a fusillade of miniature questions via email, or “cc”
every team member about each niggling little decision, it’s because they don’t
feel confident to make a decision on their own. Often, Ms. Deal found, they’re
worried about getting in trouble or downsized if they mess up.
In contrast, when employees are actually empowered, they make more judgment
calls on their own. They also start using phone calls and face-to-face chats to
resolve issues quickly, so they don’t metastasize into email threads the length
of “War and Peace.”
This is basic behavioral economics. When email is seen as an infinite resource,
people abuse it. If a corporation constrains its use, each message becomes more
valuable — and employees become more mindful of how and when they write.
Granted, not all late-night email is bad. As Ms. Deal found, employees don’t
like being forced to reply at 1 a.m., but they appreciate the flexibility of
being able to shift some work to the evening if they choose. And they don’t
mind dealing with genuine work crises that crop up during leisure hours. At
Edelman in Toronto, employees try not to bug each other in the evenings — but
if a client emails with a time-sensitive issue, they’ll respond.
These changes can’t happen through personal behavior: The policy needs to come
from the top. (If your boss regularly emails you a high-priority question at 11
p.m., the real message is, “At our company, we do email at midnight.”) And some
changes may seem like matters of housekeeping, but have major repercussions,
like keeping a separate email box for your personal messages. You can’t ignore
your work inbox if that’s also the place where friends send you weepy accounts
of their breakups.
But it’s worth it. More than a century ago, blue-collar workers fought for a
limited workday with an activist anthem: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for
rest, eight hours for what we will.” It’s a heritage that, this Labor Day, we
need to restore.
--
Cheers,
Stephen
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