Want to Boost Growth? Don't Reply All

Improving your internal email, meeting and presentation practices is quite possibly the most powerful thing you can do, starting tomorrow and with limited investment, to accelerate growth in your company.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of a conversation I had with my mom about the enormous piles of paper she would bring home from work to read on weekends. As a senior executive in a high-tech company, she would regularly plow through over 200 pages of internal memos in the years before email became commonplace.

“Wow, your boss is really ruthless giving you so much homework!” I would tell her. To me the volume seemed insurmountable.

Now, a little more than 30 years later, email dominates our life.

In research by the McKinsey Global Institute we found that knowledge workers spend around 30% of their time dealing with email. And many of those emails carry with them long PowerPoint presentations! These days 200 pages seems like hourly volume, not weekly.

On April 1, April Fool's Day in some countries, I received a new report – by email of course – that estimated the reply-all button wastes about 3 hours a week and that removing it may contribute as much as 5% to corporate profits. There’s truth in every joke - what was a massive boon for productivity is now slowing us down.

I've worked with a few executives obsessed with increasing productivity by improving internal communication. One of them managed to double selling time and another to triple the time spent by R&D on differentiating product innovation. Both executives have led their businesses from zero growth to double digit performance.  

I would love to read others' ideas about how to increase productivity with more effective internal communication.

Here are 6 ideas from me:

1. Minimize hierarchy and mid-layers edits

Some companies have as many as 10 layers between the person who knows the facts and the executive making the final decision. The collective preparation time to pass messages up and down the organization (and the inevitable loss of context) is enormous.

Even if you are not willing to aggressively increase spans and reduce layers, you should go directly to source experts and discourage unreasonable preparation and syndication time.

How? Allow people on your team who don’t know the answer to call the expert and get back to you. Otherwise they and their own direct reports might spend a shocking amount of time preparing for every possible question.

2. Focus on content not format

There are a few occasions when having really polished charts makes a big difference. For example, if you present to a large audience or if you are making a challenging sales pitch. At most other times it’s better to just focus on a clear narrative, use concise and direct language, and provide reliable numbers that are easy to follow.

I see smart managers going back to using simple and easy-to-edit tables, or directly presenting excel files. Others limit the number of slides in presentations or ask for short memos instead.

3. Consolidate, simplify and automate reports

I once worked with a company that generated more than 100 different reports. These varied in frequency from daily to quarterly, and the CEO received all of them. Hundreds of people spent thousands of hours preparing and interpreting them. Others spent even more time reconciling inconsistencies between them.

In one year we reduced 100 reports to less than 10, all of which could be generated automatically. This freed about a quarter million man hours just in preparation and improved productivity across the organization. For example, it allowed salespeople to spend 3-4 more hours with customers every week. 

4. Run meetings on time

Waiting 5 to 10 minutes a few times a day could easily add up to a few hours of waste every week. If you are the boss and you are late to your team’s call, you may be wasting 10 minutes of their time for every minute you are late. It is bad leadership and bad management, after all, you are giving your team less time to do the work you want them to do.

Too hard to change the culture? Try fining people a dollar for every minute they are late. Multiply this by the number of participants waiting. Give the proceeds to a charity or deposit them in a piggy bank to fund team events.

5. Take fuller advantage of collaboration tools

Co-editing files in the cloud improves version control and allows teams to finish work faster. Using instant messages improves response time and reduces inbox clutter. Video calls improve the quality of interaction, reduce misunderstanding and often help to avoid travel. The diffusion of these tools is rapidly increasing across middle-management, but is still very low among senior executives.

6. Don’t reply all

…unless you have a really good reason to. If you model a frenetic 24/7 email culture, your team will follow your lead. This doesn’t increase their productivity, it just makes them more distracted. We all need time away from work to think creatively.

Simply put, we can unlock immense productivity and improve morale by following the basic ethic of reciprocity - treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.

 Here are my 7 Golden Rules of Unselfish Email Etiquette: