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I was sick recently and had to miss some days of work. This meant that my email inbox was filling up. Even as we move into the holiday-end-of-semester-holiday period, I can see more than 50 emails a day. A handful of those messages matter—colleagues on a shared project, staff with specific questions that only I can answer or move forward—but a lot of it is information that I can safely ignore. There is nothing like taking a few days away from work and seeing what your inbox looks like on your return to know how email-centric your workplace is. Since email is very much an analog to a piece of paper stacked on your desk, it is the technology equivalent of assuming that collaboration requires a specific method of interacting, much like being physically present in an office.
I dread being sick. It’s not even the illness itself, which is typically viral—cold or flu—and which my body will sort out thanks to vaccinations. But there’s the mental pressure to always be present at work. During the pandemic lockdown, these conflicting needs were easier to manage. More people were working from more places and sometimes dealing with quite serious consequences. Lines blurred.
We were in Canada then and so there was also the dynamic of two nations approaching the health crisis very differently. It was understood that the government required isolation, masking, and that employers would provide some latitude. After each visit home by one of our kids, who studied at US universities but returned home for US dates like Thanksgiving, I would drive them back to school. On my return, I would be quarantined in our basement for 10 days, masked and living as separately as I could from my wife in compliance with the law.
Even in Canada, though, there was sometimes a clash between an individual’s reality and work expectations. I had returned from one 14-hour round trip and was masked up and in the basement. I connected to a work video call and the HR person on the other side was very resistant to the fact that I needed to be masked. After all, it was a virtual call! Never mind that the mask was for people in our home and had nothing to do with who I was meeting with. I stayed masked but I also understood and felt the discomfort of violating a norm.
My feeling about sick leave is (a) everyone should have access to it and (b) everyone should use it if they need it. But I also am very clear to my teams: if you are on sick leave, you are not at work. Do not “work from home” when you are sick (unless you have no alternative). I don’t want people using vacation leave to check email or join conference calls and I definitely don’t want sick people to do anything other than get well. Your workplace can get along without you for awhile, none of us is that important. If you are, it’s a good opportunity to look at your organization’s resilience for what will happen when you’re hit by the proverbial bus. (I am not, in fact, aware of any proverb that involves a bus and death)
I also don’t prefer people asking permission to take sick leave (and I abhor the notion of doctor’s notes). If you’re sick, you know better than I do; if you have sick leave, you’re entitled to use it. It’s an entitlement. Also, I don’t want to know why you’re sick. I am not interested in the operations of peoples’ gastro-intestinal tracts or their respiratory system as it pertains to their ability to work. If you ate a questionable burrito and are no longer able to focus on work, you can take the afternoon off without giving me a justification or rundown, so to speak, of why. If you’re a manager with this approach, be sure to make it clear this is about trust and not that you don’t care if your staff die of food poisoning.
That is easier said than done, though. I took a few days off and then taught a virtual class session because it was the last class of the term. I asked permission from our Dean to miss a faculty assembly—I assumed it would be fine but I’m still learning our norms here—since I’d have to be masked anyway to participate safely. I also worked from home a couple days once my fever broke but while I was still potentially contagious (and masked around the house too).
But the entire time, I felt that tension of feeling obligated to be available to my colleagues and students. Not everyone’s illness wraps up cleanly when the HR policy wants it to and when work expectations (“are they just slacking? how can they STILL be sick? it’s just a sniffle!”) start to return to normal. I also dreaded how deep my inbox would be without daily attention.
This Email Could Have Been A …
It will be a surprise to no one who reads this blog that I have thoughts about office communications. It may come as a surprise to some people that I check my email usually no more than twice a day and otherwise do not monitor it. I almost never check it before 10 or 11am on a weekday, never after 4pm (or within an hour of the end of my day), and never on weekends. Some of you might say it’s because I’m a misanthrope but it is also for productivity and other reasons mostly.
The productivity benefits of this approach are obvious (see “monk mode morning” because everything apparently needs a goofy name). If I am not checking my emails all day, I usually have longer periods of uninterrupted time. I can choose how to use those segments of time: reading, writing, teaching, class prep, governance prep, research, exploring.
This is trained behavior. I used to think that checking email around the clock was a sign of my own importance. That was something I had picked up when working at the ABA (a place where there were always things on fire) and then when I took on my first stand-alone library leadership role. When I moved to Canada in 2007, I started to moderate that perception of myself. Over time, I moved to a 9-to-5 reading of email even as my own work hours started to slide earlier (and emails I send are frequently scheduled for later delivery). Like any habit, good or bad, repetition hardens it in practice: I can easily go all day without dipping into email.
I cannot be reached using any emergency channels unless, if I am in the office, you poke your head around the door. We have phones but I rarely get or make calls and so it’s rare for me to answer a call, even if I’m in my office to do so. I also have the ingrained habit that I do not consult caller ID because I do not think that my decision to answer the phone should be based on who is calling so much as whether I am at a point where being interrupted makes sense. Marking “high importance” on an email is of no effect because my inbox is usually closed. I don’t have any text-based number for work. Since I use a web browser for email, when it is silent so is Microsoft Teams (chat, etc.). The randomness of notification configuration often means I won’t see a chat or Teams channel notification until I open up the platform.
One thing you might take away from my behavior is that most methods of getting another person’s attention can be thwarted. Many of them are for the benefit of the person initiating contact, and may not take into account the impact of the person receiving the contact. This is particularly true when there is a ratio of 20 contacts to one recipient who is just trying to get this ONE PROJECT FINISHED WITHOUT AN INTERRUPTION.
This is exacerbated if you have an external facing role. I get dozens of emails from legal publishers that have zero value. But since email is the only communication tool external contacts may have, they tend to automate their own invisibility. They send everything, important invoices and untargeted promotionals, through the same path. These generic blasts, whether internal or external, just add to the noise.
I can make choices like this because of my managerial role but I also make these choices because of my role. These choices are not just about productivity; they are also about leading with trust. I try to express this communication style, sometimes overtly saying what I do, but often just by doing it. When I have started a new role, it is not uncommon for someone to come and ask me: when do you want to hear about this, when should I check in about that. The framework is reinforced as people start to make their own decisions safely.
Most people I work with don’t really need me to make a decision. If there is an issue at a service desk, there’s probably someone better to handle it in an emergency. The value I can provide is in supporting my people when they make a decision, not making it for them. This relationship or rapport or trust takes time to build but you can help it grow by being less available so that people get used to making decisions on their own. Sometimes they’ll check in with you after a decision and it’s a great opportunity to reinforce their autonomy and good judgment.
It also ensures the right people are communicating. Even if I’m the director, I may not be of much use. If the library is on fire, call the fire brigade not the director. I had moved from San Diego and the County security department (not someone on the library staff) was for months afterwards still texting me when the building security alarm was set off. Since my texts are silent until 5am and I had no car, even if I had still been an employee there, I would probably have been of little use. I try to recuse myself from any communications loop where I can’t add value.
Deliberate Communication
Once you eliminate emergencies, people can be more thoughtful about how they communicate. Email may be the easiest—and often lowest common denominator— technology but it is not always the best choice. As a default, though, it continues to be a source of contention: I don’t think I’ve worked at an organization where there weren’t complaints of too many emails. Instead, email is often deployed thoughtlessly from what I expect is habit and a lack of familiarity or comfort with alternatives.
Emergencies can sometimes best be handled in person as well. I have sometimes been called to a service desk to provide support—and a definitive answer—to staff who are dealing with a researcher who has gone from being querulous to quarrelsome. But many emergencies have no physical component: no person in distress, no building on fire. These emergencies can be handled remotely, perhaps individually.
It’s one reason why the continued push to return to seats-in-chairs, coats-on-chair-backs seems so misguided. It assumes there’s a single best way for all collaboration or communication. I was intrigued by this look at the “Sunday Scaries”—work week anxiety that begins at 5pm on Sunday even despite pre-work triaging of emails—and how it affects office-bound employees and those who can work remotely.
Interestingly, the legal profession and government, where most law libraries probably are located, are among the lowest “industries most prone” to this anxiety, at 74% and 72% respectively. Perhaps that’s because legal professionals are most likely to struggle with switching off work at all (49%). While remote staff are 21% more likely to cite their struggle with switching off from work as a source of anxiety, on-site workers are 21% more likely to procrastinate on tasks because they are boring or repetitive.
I have long held a theory that most office communication should not occur on email but should be a discussion group that is archived. In our modern work place, that is often Microsoft Teams channels but it could be a wiki or a discussion board. Specifically, it is not in a chat service or SMS/RCS texting app which has all the drawback of interruption and dispersement as email without notable offsetting benefit. It is also not a shared document library like a SharePoint library or Box folder.
This doesn’t mean no email. But the use cases for an email are, like those for a meeting, much more limited than we normally see. An email that is a one-to-one communication that does not require immediate follow up (“I’ll be late” or “I’m out sick and can’t attend” or “Here’s what we just agreed to”) is an ideal email. As soon as you have multiple recipients, or the purpose is a process or operational discussion, or it’s a time-sensitive issue, email may not be the right tool.
This perspective was reinforced when I heard from a former colleague. They had a question about a procedure and some of the history behind it. The information that had arisen at the time had been saved into a Teams channel, so even though I had left the organization, my knowledge about that event had been saved. One of the first things I do at an organization now is to start Teams channels for staff to use. They are open to everyone so even those people who are not part of the conversation can see what is going on. You get the benefit of transparency as well as knowledge capture.
Perhaps more importantly, you shift emails that would have held that information out of inboxes. This decluttering of the inbox also allows staff to engage with the posts as their schedule allows. I think there is less of an expectation to have a Teams channel open than to be monitoring an email inbox.
It’s a deliberate shifting: something that goes onto Teams could have been an email. In fact, you can email to and from a Teams channel so it doesn’t have to force people to change how they work, just to think about what it is they are doing: what is the purpose of the communication, what is its urgency, how is it going to be used? We resort to email—and in-person work schedules—because we may not want or take the time to think about what the alternatives are.
Purpose-Driven Work
I think this is where some organizations are lost. The focus is on doing what we’ve always done and the way we’ve always done it. Even if we have all of us seen alternative ways of working, there remain leaders and managers whose elasticity has failed. Their ability to stretch has failed them and they have snapped back to the way they have always operated.
I don’t think this is working, though. We shouldn’t need the CYA emails. We should be technologically literate to be able to choose from a range of communications tools—and not just blame their existence on the youngest generation in the workplace—to fulfill the purpose of our communication. We should be able to develop work cultures where someone’s visibility is not a measure of their productivity.
It’s why meetings for me are a lot like emails. They assume that a gathering at a given time, whether physical or virtual or hybrid, is the way to communicate. One person initiates a communication to many participants. If one is lucky enough to have an agenda, you at least know the topics under discussion. How much better, though, to raise those topics in a format that captures discussion by those who can contribute, rather than using a gathering to discuss a variety of topics which may or may not involve all participants. Worse than emails, the over-use of meetings means that people’s finite time becomes encumbered and so it becomes necessary to schedule standing meetings in order to capture future time just in case. That would be like me scheduling a dozen emails on a Sunday night even though I’m not yet sure whether they’re all necessary or what the responses will be from the earlier ones.
There are definitely well-intentioned emails, emails with a purpose for the sender. The question is whether they have a purpose for the recipient. If there isn’t a match, then the best intentions will still result in clutter and poor communication. I found that I was just bulk deleting emails that were obviously out of date the day they were sent; updates for the past. In a sense, they make assumptions about when they will be read—NOW—without taking into account the recipient’s schedule and obligations. It’s like gambling for attention.
I am feeling better. I have some lingering crud but I’ve finally put the masks away. I’ll still be masking preventatively on the train but I won’t need to do it to signal that I KNOW I have a gross cough. I am also considering how best to handle this continuing email deluge. The ideal would be for there to be mandatory, repeated training. I have yet to work at an organization where just telling people how to use email has an obvious impact. It feels as though I will need to funnel more email into folders—perhaps with a baseline rule that if they are not sent to me directly, they can be put to the side—but that is also a recognition that I will be deprioritizing them to the point where they may never be read. If I can just triage the ones out that do not require follow up, I will be making headway.