Are emails crippling Productivity?

Employee Productivity is probably the most spoken about topic in any firm and occupies the predominant mindshare of top leaders. And, one of the key aspects is how does communication among the various stakeholders impacts the productivity of the employees.

We all might have come across many conversations on how high email volumes are affecting day work and impacting the flow of work. At least, you'd hear from one of your colleagues how high the number of unread emails, emails yet to be responded to keep piling-up cause anxiety and affect productivity.

If the email is understood to be a means of communication among a group of individuals, it can be characterized by these attributes.

• Recipients with a specific action (To) or sent as Information (Cc)
• Action broadly classified as Urgent and/or Important
• The subsequent exchange of information and action that follows on top of initial communication.

If you analyze these communications in form of email for an individual, it can be characterized as

• Is the communication concerned with Organization, Unit/Department, specific project, or initiative?
• Is the communication to the individual a piece of information, action, inquiry?
• If it is an action, is it urgent and/or important? When should the action get done?

A small additional step to profile the communication and add a few more data elements would do wonders to prioritize emails even before it is sent to recipients. How about an additional step for the sender to set the attributes of the communication even before that 'Send' button is hit. It will help recipients to prioritize before going through the entire message.

• At a broad level, it is easy to structure the communications into FYA and FYI messages for recipients.
• Assign urgency and importance to the messages even before it is sent to the recipient and with some flexibility
• Categorize the communications at various levels of the Organizations.

Wouldn't our job be easy if we get to the actions first when we get onto our emails and that too Urgent and Important ones?

Emails definitely consume a very significant part of our work day. It is high time that all the popular email clients re-imagine the needs of communication and re-design the structure of the message to do a world of good to many across the world grappling with email volumes.