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Organizational culture and email overload
Whenever I give a talk on solving email overload, someone inevitable raises their hand and says, "How can I get my coworkers to stop sending me so many emails?" It's a legitimate question, as lots of people suffer from needless emails in the workplace.
Nathan Zeldes covers this more in an article saying that organizational culture causes email overload:
People may hit Reply All because they think sending a message at midnight will impress the boss, or they may be trying to cover themselves and create a paper trail in an organization where mistrust is a factor. The situation calls to mind the "tragedy of the commons" scenario: Everyone would prefer that there be fewer messages, but nobody can afford to be the first to cut back on sending them.Unfortunately, organizational culture evolves much more slowly than technology does.
Nathan is right on. Just like customer experience work, changing the organization is the hardest method - and the most important.
However, there's a step missing. To solve email overload, first learn how to manage your own information. It may be easier to hope that the rest of the world sends you less email, but really - what are the chances? It's better to learn how to survive regardless of what your coworkers do or don't do.
(Hat tip to Bill for the pointer)
Mark
"Information Overload" is a complete red herring. If you were to change the word "Information" to "Baked Beans" in this phrase what would you experience? Right - an unholy stink! Just like you get when you expose yourself to way too much information in the misguided belief that its good for you. Just because technology CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD! Human cognition simply hasn't evolved much since our ancestors were facing down sabre tooth tigers on the savannah and our poor humanity simply can't process all this information in any meaningful way. The solution? Easy - limit your exposure to the information you actually have the capacity to handle, bully and cajole your leaders to implement policies to protect you from the foibles of others and harness existing technologies within the boundaries of what WORKS from a cognition perspective. If you can't handle it, no one else likely can!
Loved Bit Literacy by the way.
Stephen Barnes
You're right, Mark, that fending for oneself is easier (and I absolutely recommend adopting a personal strategy that works for one); but OTOH it addresses the symptoms, not the root causes, which are mainly at the org culture level. So I'd say the two directions - applying personal coping strategies and deploying organizational solutions - are both valid and both important, and you need both to really solve the problem (if you work in a company of above small size).
One problem with over-emailing is when a sending is not sure who is responsible for something, or who wants to observe the discussion or progress. This could be because of a lack of well defined roles; or it could be because a problem just falls outside of well defined roles. This should be OK, any competent organization should be able to deal with these situations, but email is a crude tool for dealing with such communications. If we want to have socially rich and transparent organizations, we need to develop the right communications tools and practices. Simple email blasts to "all" don't really cut it.