I enjoy reading about current events in newspapers and magazines, but unfortunately I don't always have the time do so. However, this past weekend, I came across a really great article in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal by Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns ("The Curse of Off-hours Email"). These two authors know what they are talking about, as they conducted the original study upon which the WSJ article is based.
The WSJ article begins with the following case scenario:
Imagine it's the end of the workday and you have a non-urgent question to ask a colleague. You know this colleague has already gone home for the day, but you send off an email to them anyway.
How many times have you found yourself in a similar situation? Conversely, if you are that colleague who is the recipient of the email, when do you respond? There is no question that the lines separating work from home have been considerably blurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly early on during the pandemic when so many teams were forced to work remotely from home. Even now, a number of teams continue to work remotely (I read one report that suggested that 1 in 4 Americans will be working remotely through the end of 2021 and slightly less than that will be working remotely by the end of 2025). In other words, the lines separating work from home will get more blurred (and not less) with the passage of time.
I want to be clear though. The question of whether to respond to a work email when you are at home did not arise because of the pandemic. Individuals struggled with this question even before COVID-19. For example, according to reports by the Radicati Group, employees spend, on average, more than 2 hours a day sifting through and reading emails - that's 28% of the normal work week! Unfortunately, the number of emails that individuals receive is expected to increase by approximately 3% every year. I suspect that this isn't a surprise to most of you. What's even more concerning is the fact that over half of employees send or respond to emails outside of normal working hours! Again, I suspect that's not a surprise.
Here's the surprising (maybe) statistic. Even though the vast majority of after-hours emails do not require an after-hours response, over three-fourths of employees (at least in one survey) typically respond within an hour (and just under one-third respond within 15 minutes!).
Drs. Giurge and Bohns conducted a series of studies involving over 4,000 subjects to further address the question posed in their WSJ article above. They had subjects answer surveys from the perspective of an individual sending versus receiving an after-hours, non-urgent email. Receivers assumed they needed to respond 36% faster than the senders expected. Importantly, these receivers were more stressed by having to respond (or more specifically, feeling like they needed to respond), which they also felt contributed to greater degrees of burnout.
The results were similar no matter how they varied the experimental conditions. For example, in one study, emails were marked as either "urgent" or "non-urgent." Labeling the email as "urgent" certainly increased the recipient's feeling that he or she needed to respond right away (as you would expect, I think). And this was true regardless of whether the email was sent during normal work-hours or after-hours. What is more suprising is that even when the email was marked as "non-urgent", recipients still felt that the sender expected a quick response! Again, it didn't matter whether the email was sent during normal work-hours or after-hours.
I completely understand both perspectives. I often send email after normal working hours (admittedly, it's one of the only times that I feel that I can catch up with my Inbox), but I don't expect anyone to respond until they return to work. However, unless I specifically state "Do not respond until tomorrow", this study suggests that the recipient will feel like I am waiting for a response. Taking the perspective of the recipient, I feel if I don't respond immediately to an email, the sender may feel like I am ignoring him or her (regardless of whether that sender is a direct report or my boss, but especially if it's my boss).
Drs. Giurge and Bohns label this phenomenon as the email urgency bias. It's an extension of something that is described in a whole body of literature (that they reference in the article) called an ego-centric bias. As they describe it in the WSJ article, "People tend to be anchored in their own perspective in the moment and often fail to appreciate the ways in which someone in a different position might be interpreting the same situation."
The important lesson from this article is that there is an effective method (tested and proven in the last study that Drs. Giurge and Bohns conducted) to mitigate the email urgency bias. Rather than marking the email as "Urgent" or "Non-urgent" (which doesn't work apparently), try starting an after-hours email with one of the following statements:
"Even though I'm sending this email outside regular work hours, which fits my own work-life schedule best, I don't expect a response outside of your own work hours."
"Note that you might receive this message outside of my office hours but that I have no expectation to receive a message outside of your office hours."
"Please know that I respect boundaries and personal time. If you receive an email from me during your personal time, please protect your time and wait to respond until you are working. It's important that we all prioritize joy over email whenever possible."
As it turns out, these kind of statements work! There was no evidence of the email urgency bias in the final study - both the sender's and recipient's expected response time aligned nicely. Alternatively, many email providers provide a nice little feature that you can hold an email until a certain time. With that kind of feature, email messages can be written by the sender at whatever time is convenient for him/her, but the message doesn't get delivered until normal work-hours.
Granted, these small changes don't address the fact that emails are becoming more frequent (and I've not even touched the culture of "Reply to All"). That is a topic for another day. I will end, as I frequently do, with a quote. Television personality and journalist Willie Geist once said, "I'm pretty sure people are going to start writing letters again once the email fad passes." Maybe he is on to something...
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