Buried under E-mail

The volume of e-mail has never been higher, and it's still growing. By the end of 2021, the total number of business and consumer e-mails will reach nearly 320 billion per day, according to The Radicati Group.¹ That's a colossal increase over the 269 billion we already send and receive today.

Even though social media itself has soared, most platforms still require an e-mail address to sign up. It's the same with banking and shopping. E-mail may have long lost its cool factor, but we can't quit it:

• The average office worker receives 121 e-mails a day
• More than 49 percent of those e-mails are spam
• Two percent have a malicious attachment
• Fifty-five percent are opened on a desktop
• Twenty-five percent are opened on a smartphone
• E-mails most likely to be opened are sent on a Saturday
• E-mails least likely to be opened are sent on a Friday²
• Forty-two percent of Americans check their e-mail in the bathroom
• Eighteen percent of Americans check their e-mail while driving.³ (Arrrgh! Pay attention to the road, people.)

E-mail frequently fails as communication because people equate responsiveness with responsibility. E-mail trumps any other task we should be doing, so we suffer through all of it—the relevant and the inconsequential—to make sure the one e-mail we need doesn't get lost in the noise. This signal-to-noise ratio dooms e-mail to inefficiency.

Yet, though everyone complains about their inboxes, nobody is sending fewer messages. E-mail has proven to be a staple of our digital diets, one that doesn't require an actual conversation or any other heavy social lifting. You can just shoot out a quick note and switch to the next new message. (Hello, dopamine.)

As for instant messaging, it's second verse, same as the first. And the sheer number of messages we send and receive merrily increases.

We like sending and receiving. The noise is comforting. It makes us feel social, busy, and even important. There's evidence that merely anticipating the possibility of a message releases dopamine; it's also released when we anticipate sending a message.

But that cascade of messages threatens to paralyze us. It creates an overload of options, which can push us into decisions against our own interest.⁴ At work, this can mean a lack of organization that hurts performance. When an employee feels bombarded, he is more likely to retreat to the relative sanctuary of Instagram or Facebook.

Someone Call a Meeting

With the seemingly endless forms of communication that the digital world offers us, you might assume fewer meetings would be a benefit. You would assume poorly. The constantly connected world laughs at our optimistic intent. More access creates more meetings than ever and stunts our productivity.

And the meetings themselves are impacted as task-switching participants give only a fraction—or any—of their focus. Which makes sense. If you have a ton of meetings, then you need to get your other work done sometime. But this ironically leads to more meetings because no one paid attention in the first one.

And much like e-mail, we love the “benefits” that meetings provide us. It's a lot of fun to do an internal road show and walk your colleagues through that PowerPoint you painstakingly put together. We also love the access that meetings give us to people and their brain share. In a world where our focus is so fractured, there is a constant, nagging feeling that maybe our solutions and work aren't as good as they could be. Tapping into the insights and ideas of others can alleviate that fear—and displace blame should things go wrong. Of course, this slows work down immensely and can water down good and courageous ideas.

Technology allows us to schedule more meetings. So we do. And people can attend without being physically present (or psychically present, if they're on vacation). Meeting creep has advanced to the point that we spend more time talking about our work than doing it. “I have to finish this major proposal. How about, rather than doing that, I call a meeting to talk with others about ways we can improve the proposal that I'm avoiding?”

In the same way that e-mail overload can paralyze us, excessive meetings are a response to feeling overwhelmed—a result of poor attention allocation—as opposed to being genuinely overworked. Meetings become a way to look busy in lieu of actually focusing on the work—or a futile attempt to find focus in the work.

One company spent a mind-blowing 300,000 employee hours a year on a single weekly executive committee meeting (for context, each of us gets only about 8,700 hours a year total, including sleep).⁵ And research from Bain & Company revealed that a typical manager loses 16 hours a week herding e-mails and going to unnecessary meetings.⁶

The Relic of Hierarchy

Historically, organizations have structured communication through a natural hierarchy that mimics the military. Decisions flow from the top down through the ranks. Concerns and suggestions come from any level and go to the direct report.

Many older leaders still operate from this model, and it drives younger employees crazy.

It's not because younger employees are a bunch of narcissists who want to be best buddies with the CEO (even if true, that's not the problem). It's because the through-the-ranks method of communication is predicated on communication access as the bottleneck. And that's no longer the case.

In a world with direct access to everyone (including our celebrity crush on Twitter), these employees assume they should communicate directly with whoever would most benefit from the information: “Forget my manager. I want to text Jeff Bezos.”

Now it's the seven layers of leadership between employee and CEO who are being driven crazy.

The question isn't who is right and who is wrong. It's how do we get people with radically different life experiences and expectations on the same page.

The Communication Compact

As leaders, we must steer communication to the right channels so that everyone feels heard and valued. And because we communicate about everything except how we communicate, I recommend one in-person meeting per year where you communicate about how you interact in all facets—from texts to e-mails to meetings to lines of communication. The results of this meeting are what we call a Communication Compact with your team.

A Communication Compact is one of the most valuable tools we offer to clients at Focuswise. It's a social contract that outlines expectations and consequences of communication within your team.

In this annual team meeting, discuss the challenges and expectations. We have a guide we use (available at focuswise.com/cihya/five), but you can start even simpler by asking employees a simple question: What are your three biggest communication challenges? Afterward, implement what you learned. Collaborate on how to handle these issues while also addressing channel selections and response times and reducing volume.

It's critical to not unilaterally dictate the rules that govern your team. By making it a group process, you ensure buy-in. And don't worry; you aren't the only one annoyed by Jim's consistent tendency to CC everyone and Jane's really annoying phone-during-the-entire-meeting habit (probably checking Instagram). Trust the group, and you will get the benefits you're looking for. Plus, employees want to be heard—a lot. In a study by two Harvard psychologists, subjects were willing to take as much as a 25 percent pay cut just to share their opinions.⁷

Creating your Communication Compact ensures that sharing information and opinions doesn't disrupt the chain of command yet allows for the most efficient flow in communication to help employees get their work done rather than wait on approvals and feedback. Effective Communication Compacts address two critical ways organizations communicate in the digital age: messaging and meetings. The next two chapters explore how to succeed with both.