By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady
Today BLR founder and CEO Bob Brady looks at the pros—and many cons—of e-mail and meetings, and he asks for your opinions about the biggest e-mail annoyances.
Which wastes more time, e-mail or meetings?
According to no less an authority than the New York Times, the economy loses $650 billion a year because of unnecessary workplace interruptions. Some writers suggest that most of that total comes from e-mail and instant messages (IM). Think about it: E-mails from bosses and co-workers, from friends, from advertisers, from the HR Daily Advisor (mea culpa!), from total strangers, from spammers—it does not end.
The average worker checks e-mail 50 times a day and IMs 77 times daily, according to the Times. Regardless of the number, this consumes a huge chunk of the day.
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E-mail-less Fridays?
One writer recently suggested that employers ban e-mails on Friday (or doing certain hours, etc.).
The idea has some surface appeal, but it is as unlikely to take hold as a similar “rule” banning meetings. The reason is simple: Meetings and e-mail are not drags on efficiency. In the wrong hands, they waste time, but they are pervasive for the simple reason that they work. They help us get our jobs done.
Take meetings. A well-run meeting has an agenda. Its organizer makes sure that only the right participants are present. The participants either have information to supply, or they need the information being supplied. The meeting doesn’t drag on, and it ends with a clear understanding of follow-up tasks.
Good meetings are about “communication.” They help the group get its work done and make it more productive. At the risk of overstating the case, people who “hate meetings” are often people who don’t communicate as well as they could.
That is not to say that many meetings are not wastes of time. Speakers drone on. Nothing is decided. Notes are not kept. People are included for political rather than operational needs. However, not having the meeting usually doesn’t solve those problems. The same dysfunctional conduct will take place in another form and added to it will be further disjointedness.
Memos, letters, policies, etc., are important parts of communication, but they lack the give and take, the shared experience of flesh and blood (present even in electronically facilitated “meetings”).
E-Mail Discipline
E-mail follows the same dynamics. It is a powerful tool that can easily be misused.
Banning or restricting it through time-based rules doesn’t strike me as a good or realistic solution. I think it is fantasy to expect that a full or partial ban on e-mail would be productive, but we do need to become (and probably are becoming) more disciplined as the medium matures. Expect to see more commonsense “rules” evolve.
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Personal e-mails and personal IMs are like personal phone calls—verboten beyond certain minimal allowances, depending on the workplace. Using e-mail to avoid personal contact is like any other “over the transom” aggression.
Copying dozens of people who have little to do with the subject or project will be seen for what it is—self-aggrandizing politics.
But I won’t go on. Suffice it to say that I’m totally opposed to any kind of artificial ban on e-mail, but completely behind better standards of e-mail etiquette. Enough said.
We all have our list of the biggest e-mail annoyance. Send me yours. We’ll compile a list to share in an upcoming HR Daily Advisor.
Send your list to Rbrady@blr.com, and also let me know if you would favor an e-mail-less Friday or other time-based e-mail “rule.”