Email Overwhelm

The biggest problem in the global office

There is a reason far too many offices are filled with dissatisfied, demotivated and demoralised workers. 

Workers who have trained hard, for considerable lengths of time and for some, at great cost, are no longer practicing their art, their profession or their calling; they are sitting on their arses sending mountains of email.

 On my travels, I have asked the following questions of multiple audiences:

• On average, how many emails do you receive every day?
• What do you do when you first open your in-box?

The answers lead me to the conclusions that:

•  We all receive, roughly, 100 emails every day.
• As soon as we open our in-box we delete the rubbish.

Some of us receive many more than the average 100 and a few of us (lucky ones) receive a few less. The rubbish, that we immediately delete equates to approximately 80% of all emails received!

Back in 2008, Jon Bentham wrote an article in the Guardian entitled: “If you only do one thing this week…speak to a colleague instead of emailing”. In the article, Jon referenced that we are (were) sending around 3 billion emails a day. Sadly, our email habits do not seem to have changed over the last decade but the volume of noise certainly has.

At the start of the year we were sending 267 billion emails daily! That is too many for anyone who is serious about communication to handle. The shocking coincidence of this is 213 billion of that oceanic volume are immediately deleted - and we still consider email as a powerful communication tool!

If you are using email to attach asked for or legal documents or you need a chain of communication history to recall and refer to then email is really useful. If you are trying to communicate in a human way and create rapport with your audience then it is an outrageous waste of your time.

Sadly, only a few, enlightened, organisations are working to reduce this criminal loss of productivity.

The problem is not going away, however. Email is the global go-to for business communication. It doesn’t matter if it stopped working years ago, there are not enough courageous ‘children’ to highlight that the Emperor is in fact walking around with no clothes on.

I’m being a bit harsh, it still works, occasionally. It won’t, for much longer, hence the proliferation of alternative communication options knocking on every office door.

Most of us will hang on to the bitter end and complain that no-one replies to our messages anymore rather than looking a little deeper at why the human response has, like all communication, evolved in this way.

Like all human communication; technology has enabled us to interact in ways that are so much cheaper, easier and more convenient than those of the dark days before the internet, global Wi-Fi, mobile devices and social media. We absolutely love cheap, easy and convenient and we are, not surprisingly, addicted to it. Sound good? 

The hidden costs of cheap, easy and convenient are, actually, Outrageous!

But, we are happily ignoring this truth and it threatens to consume our humanity.

Hold on a second Nick, are you saying that email and stuff will spell the end of the world?

The end of the world as we knew it, yes indeed, it already has!

Cheap, easy and convenient methods of communication, such as the 267 billion emails that are floating around the global office today have required us to sacrifice three of the most critical human attributes which prove a cohesive bond that prevents our lives falling apart.

We have (happily) sacrificed Empathy, Rapport and Human Resonance for our cheap, easy and convenient alternatives and because of this the following will come to pass:

 ·     Without empathy, we cease to care how others feel and we stop seeing the world from alternative viewpoints – Polarisation and Nationalism will and are already increasing to dangerous proportions.

·     Without rapport, we will struggle to get along with others, relationships will begin to fail, our colleagues, our customers and even our families will see division as standard – loneliness, sadness and isolation will become the norm.

·     Without human resonance, we fail to communicate with depth and meaning and our messages no longer reverberate with important meaning, are no longer absorbed, do not lead to action, to change or even to the point where our audience are interested.

This will not end well. 

Our communication is evolving but our humanity has been left behind.

So what can we do to make a difference? What changes can we realistically apply in the office to bring back the positive aspects of being a professional, inspiring and human communicator?

I’ll share a host of powerful suggestions in a series of articles – feel free to get in touch and we can explore specific solutions to yours and your organisations communication problems or, hold tight and enjoy the strategies as the articles are published.

As it’s a Friday, which for me is ‘Phone-Call Friday’, the day in which I do my best to make calls rather than send emails, my first suggestion is all about that rare gem called your phone.

Pick up the phone. 

Sounds like a feasible idea – cut through the noise and make a call. 

If you’ve tried to call anyone at work recently, you’ll know that this is not as easy as it sounds. It is rare to get any response other than voicemail. Email and the speed of communication busyness has meant that (in theory) we are too busy to answer the phone. 

We have 100s of emails to wade through, of course, so there is never enough time to have a phone conversation. Ironically, if the call is from a genuine colleague or contact then it is a superb method of cutting through the communication noise (and actually saving a heap of time). 

Phone calls are becoming infrequent and therefore a hidden super-power. To combat the first line of defence of voicemail make sure you leave the most amazing, enthusiastic and encouraging messages you can muster:

 “I can’t believe I’ve missed you! 

I’m so excited about this conversation that I’ve closed my in-box to dial you. And you’re not there! This is too amazing to be lost in the ocean of email, I’ll call you again in an hour – hope you’re there…”

Persevere. Be the person who calls. Make it your policy to pick up the phone, at least 3 times a day and see how your results sky-rocket. You'll feel more human too, it's a win-win.

The art of conversation is not dead, it is simply hibernating underneath a seemingly comfortable pile of unwanted email. Re-awaken your voice and begin to share it with your world.

Join me in ‘Phone-Call Friday’ and embrace a human tradition that is incredibly powerful, allows you to discover so much more than you thought possible and can be great fun too.

Please feel free to give me a call on +447800662450 and let's talk...

More solutions will be coming soon.

Nick Looby is a communication specialist, speaker, trainer and author. He works with individuals, teams and organisations to enhance existing skills and turbo charge some yet to be discovered, essential ones for our evolving world.