Often someone will start a correspondence about, say “Ideas for our meeting on Friday.” As people respond to this email, someone throws in another topic, just because they happen to think of it right then, i.e. — “On another topic, here is my shortlist of vendors to use for our automotive project.”

Now you have a completely new subject that relates to an important project buried within a quick informational email that is date specific. It’s like filing important papers in the wrong folder.

These are the sort of problems that could be easily solved if people identified them and learned how to make better use of subjects, types of emails, who to copy, how to ask for action, etc.

I was a consultant on organizational change in a former life, and as part of that process I often looked at workflow. One of the first things I did was follow the paper trail – either physical or email. That trail is now even more multifaceted and instantaneous, which makes it even more important that people recognize there is a trail, that it may be critical and needs to be handled well.

Great topic!

Coming from a Lean (Toyota Production System) perspective, the next step is to do something similar to what Gini did: talk about effective and ineffective usages, come to an agreement, set parameters, and try it out. Gini even went one step further and looked for the “root cause” of the problem and talked about how to eliminate it.

Hats off to you, Gini. Even without realizing it, you’re practicing Lean.

Abso-freaking-lutely! You are 100% right! We do need a nice balance of email and real-life conversations.

And your list of reasons email is being used that don’t work is right on what was happening here.

I really thought we’d just try an internal email ban for 10 days, figure out it wasn’t working, and go back to using it. But it was working so well for communication that we decided, as a group, to continue down the path.

That being said, just yesterday during our staff meeting, we had the conversation about when it’s appropriate to use email, DM on Twitter, or instant messaging. We decided it’s NOT to avoid conflict conversations in person. It’s NOT to ask for help on projects or “make assignments” (a term that irks the heck out of me). It’s NOT to have strategic conversations. It’s NOT to CYA.

What we do use it for is to send ideas or thoughts to the entire office. We use it to relay policies (instead of printing a memo and putting it on everyone’s chairs). We use it to share links we don’t put on our public sites. We use it provide information that doesn’t require discussion.

But if someone sends me an email, I either pick up the phone and answer them or I walk over to their office…even if it’s a small answer that isn’t a big deal. It fosters creativity, brainstorming, and accountability.

The most common (mis)uses of e-mail form the rotten beating heart of office inefficiency in the modern workplace.

In reading Gini’s article on the benefits their team saw when giving up e-mail, most of them focused around improved communication because the staff was forced to talk directly to one another instead of use e-mail. However, it feels like they tried to correct an unbalanced pendulum by forcing it dramatically to the opposite side. I would posit that the communication problems created by taking certain communications online seems to me to be a failing not of e-mail itself, but in the communication approaches it’s come to engender thanks to its ease-of-use and less-than-personal approach to a communication.

As I think back to the days when e-mail wasn’t as widely used, I remember some not necessarily efficient processes like having to type/copy and distribute meeting notes on paper or even save them on a file server, having to call multiple people over the course of many minutes to relay the same message, or having to play phone tag with a client around our meeting schedules to exchange simple information.

When used for good, e-mail can bring efficiency to information sharing and work collaboration. The problem is it’s being used today for so many things it’s not designed for: critical strategy discussions, conversations that should be interactive dialogs, propagation of misunderstanding when both parties clearly aren’t communicating well, CYA, and more. The secret to reduced in-boxes and improved efficiency for many of us most likely isn’t a total ban on e-mail, but instead a re-visitation of the most basic skill of matching the best communication tool with each individual communication. If we can help remind people that e-mail is only *one* communication option and help them identify its most appropriate usages, we’d go a long way towards swinging the communication pendulum back to an even keel.