A new law establishing
workers’ “right to disconnect” went into effect in France on January 1 of this
year. The law requires companies with more than 50 employees to establish hours
when staff should not send or answer emails. In an interview with the BBC, French legislator Benoit
Hamon described the law as an answer to the travails of employees who “leave
the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of
electronic leash — like a dog.”
We all know intuitively that
we are more connected to the workplace than ever before. When Bain &
Company examined e-communications and other forms of collaboration at two dozen
large global companies, we found that the time devoted to email, instant
messaging (IM), crowdsourcing, and other online communications is extensive
and, unfortunately, on the rise. We used Microsoft Workforce Analytics
(formerly VoloMetrix) and other data mining tools to comb through information
captured in Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and similar applications to understand
precisely how much time is dedicated to processing e-communications — that is,
sending, reading, and responding to email, IM, and other messages. What we
found confirmed what many of us have long suspected, namely:
- Senior executives now receive 200 (or more) emails per day.
- The average frontline supervisor devotes about eight hours each week —
a full business day — to sending, reading and answering e-communications.
- The level of e-communication has grown every year since 2008 (the year
we started examining this data), and much of it now creeps into off-hours
and weekends.
Of the eight hours managers
devote to e-communications each week, we estimate 25% of that time is consumed
reading emails that should not have been sent to that particular manager and
25% is spent responding to emails that the manager should never have answered.
Stated differently, the
average frontline supervisor devotes almost half a day each week to processing
unnecessary e-communications.
There is nothing an individual
employee can do to combat this onslaught. Neglect too many emails or IMs, and
you risk irritating your peers or, worse, your boss. And if sending endless
email chains is the way your organization gets things done, then you have no
real choice but to adopt the ways of the tribe. In short, excessive
e-communication is an organizational problem. It demands organizational
solutions.
While the intent of France’s
new law is laudable, rules like this confuse effect with cause, and as a result
probably will not slow the tide of e-communication. At best, these measures
will merely shift the timing of workplace communications from off-hours to the
workday and push other “work” to weekends and after hours. In short, government
officials can tell employers that they should not expect employees to respond
to e-communications during off-hours, but unless the need — or perceived need —
for excessive email, IM, crowdsourcing, and the like is somehow addressed, no
government mandate will have much of an impact on the total time devoted to
e-communications by employees or supervisors. Indeed, the French may quickly
discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay
connected during off-hours to reduce the need to take time away from family and
friends to complete other work-related tasks.
The only way to decrease the
total time dedicated to e-communications is to encourage leaders and employees
to manage the load they put on the organization through email, IM, and so on.
In our work with clients, we have come to believe that the best way to do this
is to provide real-time information to leaders regarding organizational load,
defined as the total hours devoted to reading and responding to emails
originating from each executive. The leadership team at Seagate, for example,
found that merely providing information on the total load each manager
generated each week compared to peer executives helped to reduce
unnecessary e-communications. Internal competition encouraged leaders to reduce
the number of employees copied on each email as well as the responses they sent
to emails that did not require one.
Combined, these actions reduced the time
devoted to processing e-communications, without the need for
mandates. Information alone modified management’s behavior.
Another simple but powerful
action is to eliminate “Reply All” — figuratively or literally. Since it takes
time to read any email, even those that are unnecessary or not intended for
you, the Reply All feature can be a big time waster. In the organizational time
audits we described earlier, we found that Reply All being so easy to use costs
the average frontline supervisor more than 30 minutes a week in processing
unnecessary e-communications. Eliminate the feature and you will liberate
unproductive time across the organization.
There is little doubt that
unnecessary e-communications is costly, not just to the individual employee but
to society at large. It contributes to employee burnout and lost productivity.
But legal mandates focused on the symptoms, rather than the cause, of excessive
emails are likely to have little effect. It’s time for leaders to take
responsibility for the load they put on the organization and to take steps to
change the way work gets done on the job. Only then will employees be able to
successfully cut the leash and focus their precious time on delivering great
results.
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