Cultures that undermine autonomy, promote power for the few, favouritism, racism or misogyny, the list goes on.
Email is a vital tool in increasing overall business efficiency, but as with all forms of communication, it needs to be a practiced discipline to ensure that its use does not become an artefact of toxicity within the organisation.
Email use that supports toxic cultures can take numerous forms, for example:
-Overuse of carbon copying or BCC’s, the former of which creates information overkill or superfluous contact, the latter of which embodies other agendas.
-Emails sent at ridiculous times of night, a practice subject to multiple interpretations by recipients including over dedication, over competitiveness, collusion with long hour’s culture, an implied urgency and one upmanship by apparent diligence. Most know what Monday is like when the inbox is replete with emails sent over the weekend!
-Emails used to transfer responsibility/liability often involving detail that is both timeconsuming yet still ambiguous.
-Emails best described as “covering one’s rear end”.
-Emails that are sent to everyone in Christendom with little regard to the relevancy, emphasising the over importance of the sender, or again shifting liability.
We did not evolve with email and in many ways, it is completely atypical of human communication. It occurs within different time-based processing to traditional forms of communication. Understanding is impacted by a mixture of the real-time email stream and perceptual priorities in the gaps that exist between. The greater immediacy of phone calls or face-to-face encounters removes these perceptual breaks but requires greater social skills and a commitment to dynamic, respectful and evolving relationships.
Electronic text generally lacks these nuances, and can feel instead like bland shifts of responsibility, creators of audit trails, or simply edicts without context. Emotions communicated within are often coded in a way that is often more a recipe for paranoia than real understanding.
In an increasingly technological world, often with multisite, multinational factors, email can be invaluable in ensuring communication occurs. But it only ensures a certain type of communication occurs and can neglect the relational spaces that exist between human beings that involve qualities that require careful attention. Within this I’m referring to the trust, greater mutual understanding, role identification and the clarification of the values both underpinning the relationship and the transaction at hand. When these are absent, communication becomes wooden, anodyne, relationships become unclear and easily subject to defensiveness over achieving real outcomes.
Superfluous, inefficient communication costs companies. The biggest commodity involved is time, but the biggest casualties are staff engagement and wellbeing. Unfortunately, many companies try to address this via engagement surveys. Issues of culture are time-consuming however, and to cut through this, surveys are conducted by means of, you have guessed it- email! It’s like another sip of the same poison! Whilst email use is always only a reflection of underlying organisational culture, which always needs detailed, careful attention, here are a few things that might help.
-Develop a culture of brief face-to-face problemsolving meetings with clear agendas to deal with an issue that would otherwise fester on email.
-Encourage the greater use of telephones.
-Identifying clear roles and responsibilities by whatever communication is used and a clear establishment of who needs to know rather than simply copying everyone in for safety’s sake.
-Implement policies on after hours emails, especially those that feature early morning intervention. These people might need to be referred to occupational health as arguably someone compelled to do an email in the early hours, instead of sleeping, has at best a problem with priorities and at worst an underlying mental health problem! Communication that regularly crosses international time zones may require particularly thoughtful measures.
-Recognise the role of additional forms of parallel electronic communication. The use of WhatsApp, messenger et cetera are often used parallel to email communication by some, often only adding to problems in the communication stream and creating complex audit trails.
As with all tools, we can use them skilfully or bludgeon people. Mastery of business communication involves thought, group consensus and policies that recognise that people are about people.
