by David Burkus
Thierry Breton and Atos aren’t even the only ones to ban email. Cristian Rennella, cofounder of the South American travel comparison website el Mejor Trato (eMT), found that his team was really good at responding to email, but that email was also really good at distracting his team. So he banned it, or at least banned all internal emails. Employees resisted at first, but after a three-month trial period everyone was on board. “There’s no way we are going back to email,” Rennella said.7 “We have efficiency.” Rennella’s firm is a much smaller company than Atos, but the logistics of banning email may have been even harder to implement, since the company has no office and all employees work virtually. Like Atos, eMT built an internal communication network that it uses to manage projects and communication. Also like the Atos system, eMT’s system features no notifications or alerts that interrupt a focused employee.
A number of different studies conducted recently support these leaders’ assertions that email isn’t the best tool for staying productive and stress-free. Many surveys show that the experience of Atos employees mirrors the average employee’s. In 2014 over 108 billion email messages were sent and received every day.8 Email occupies 23 percent of the average employee’s workday, and that average employee checks his or her email 36 times an hour.9
One research study even supports Breton’s moratorium on internal email. Researchers Gloria Mark and Stephen Voida from the University of California at Irvine and Armand Cardello from the US Army cut off email usage for thirteen civilian information workers and measured the effects of the cutoff in a variety of ways.10 The researchers first took participants through a three-day baseline period in which they were interviewed and observed visually and using computer monitoring software. Mark and her colleagues even measured the participants’ heart rates (as a proxy for stress levels). Then they pulled the plug on email. Specifically, they installed a filter on participants’ email program that would file away all incoming messages for later reading and remove all notifications of the incoming messages. (Participants were allowed to access the emails they received prior to the cutoff day.)
This “no-email” condition continued for five days, during which time the researchers continued to observe the participants, track their computer usage, and measure their heart rates. With no access to email, participants changed their habits: they began to communicate face-to-face and over the telephone more frequently. The researchers also noticed that all except one participant spent significantly more time in each computer program; this observation suggests that participants were more focused on the tasks in front of them and less distracted by attempts to multitask email communication alongside their intended work project. They also experienced significantly less stress during the no-email period than measured during the baseline. In short, participants were more focused and less stressed when they couldn’t use email. Participants noticed this effect as well. They consistently reported feeling more relaxed and focused, as well as more productive, with their email shut off than under normal working conditions.
The productivity finding is particularly interesting: we often feel more productive once we’ve cleaned out our email inbox, despite perhaps not accomplishing anything value-creating for our organization. These researchers’ findings certainly suggest that Breton’s zero-email policy had a positive effect on his company’s productivity and profitability.
Gloria Mark believes that making no-email a company policy may have been what made it so effective. “It’s really an organizational mandate, because if any single individual tries to pull out of this email web, they’re going to be penalized and out of the loop,” she said.11
Without knowing about Mark’s research, Shayne Hughes re-created the experiment on his own employees. Hughes serves as the president of Learning as Leadership, a California-based organizational development consulting firm, and in 2012 he issued an executive order forbidding internal email communication for one week.12
Hughes’s employees were skeptical at first, wondering how they would accomplish anything without email as a collaboration tool. Some employees thought the company would be in chaos or grind to a halt. But as the week progressed the team found that email had actually been a pretty blunt tool. Old-school methods like face-to-face conversations and the telephone were much more useful. “Outlawing internal email for a week challenged us not only to be more thoughtful about what we worked on but also to be more deliberate about what we address and with whom,” Hughes recalled.13
Hughes also found that during the week he outlawed email the whole company’s stress level decreased and their productivity level increased. “When we stopped sending one another e-mail, we stopped winding one another up,” Hughes recalled. “The decrease in stress from one day to the next was palpable. So was our increase in productivity”—just as Mark’s research would have predicted. “Whether it was the trust built when two team members worked through a conflict or the unexpected creativity we accessed when we tackled a problem together, communicating reconnected us with the neglected power of human interaction.”
Putting Limits on Email
While Gloria Mark’s research certainly lends support to Atos’s zero-email policy and Shayne Hughes’s week off from email, Mark herself prefers less drastic measures. “I think that people should restrict reading emails to limited times during the day instead of continually checking it,” she said.14 Rather than going without email entirely, using it in moderation seems more reasonable to her. Interestingly, other research suggests that limiting email checks to certain times is just as effective as banning it completely. A policy of moderation in email use might be enough to bring about the same decreases in stress and increases in productivity.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia designed a two-week-long experiment in which individuals toggled between checking email at will and restricting the number of times they checked it.15 The researchers randomly assigned volunteers to one of two groups. The first group was instructed to check their email as often as they could (the aptly named “unlimited-email” condition); the second group was instructed to limit their email checking to only three times per day and to keep their email program closed the rest of the day (the equally aptly named “limited-email” condition).
One week into the experiment, the groups’ instructions were switched so that the first group took on the limited-email condition and the second group the unlimited-email condition. At 5:00 p.m. every weekday of the study (presumably the end of the workday), all participants were sent a link to complete a survey with a variety of measurements that were designed to evaluate their level of distraction, stress, positive or negative emotions, well-being, feelings of connectedness, quality of sleep, and even feelings of meaningfulness in life. Similar to the no-email study, these researchers’ findings showed that participants reported significantly less stress when they were working under the limited-email condition than under the unlimited-email condition.
When in the limited-email condition, participants also felt much less distracted and better able to focus. Although stress itself was the only direct effect linked to the reduction in email, the reports of lowered stress were also associated with other positive results, such as social connection, sleep quality, and even finding meaning in life. Interestingly, the effect of limiting email on lowering stress was found to be about as strong as the effects of many common relaxation techniques, such as slow breathing and peaceful imagination. In other words, limiting email may not bring people to their happy place, but it will lower stress just as much as being there.
Researchers believe that limiting email decreases stress and increases productivity because it cuts back on multitasking and distraction. “Email increases multitasking,” said Kostadin Kushlev, the lead author on the limited-email study. “It fragments our attention and contributes to our feeling that there is too much to do and not enough time to do it.”16 A significant body of work suggests that when two tasks require the same level of cognitive resources (w
orking memory), people cannot perform them simultaneously. Because of the amount of focus and thought required, they don’t actually multitask but instead switch between the two tasks, juggling them back and forth. This explains why many of us can drive normally while listening passively to the radio, but using a smartphone to talk, text, or compose email harms our driving ability almost as much as driving while intoxicated.17
Beyond dealing with the cognitive load on working memory of executing two tasks at the same time, the switching back and forth makes further demands on working memory. To make matters worse, some theories suggest that approaching the limits of our working memory leaves us even more prone to distraction—and hence likely to toss one more weight onto our cognitive load. With notifications received every time a new email arrives, email inboxes are perfectly designed to encourage task-switching. Moreover, the inbox is often designed so that users see both the current email and a list of several other emails awaiting attention. Even worse, most of us leave our email program running in the background, drawing us away from whatever other computer programs we are working in and luring our attention back to the inbox. By leading us to task-switch, email not only increases our stress but actually reduces the quality of our overall work. That explains why participants in both studies who limited or eliminated email in their workday reported feeling more productive. “Multitasking often feels exciting, and we may feel like we are getting a lot done,” said Kushlev. “But this subjective feeling is an illusion.”18
Beyond reducing our ability to focus on the present job, work email can also encroach on our ability to focus at home, unsettling whatever work-life balance we’re seeking. So while only a few companies have taken the leap that Thierry Breton called for at Atos, many companies have taken steps to limit email to normal workday hours.
In 2011, a few months after Atos’s zero-email policy went into effect, the automaker Volkswagen agreed to cease email communication outside of normal business hours.19 The company configured its email servers to stop sending or receiving email from German staff members thirty minutes after the end of the workday and to resume the connection thirty minutes before the next workday begins. Volkswagen staff can still use the phones to make calls and to browse the Internet after hours, but no new emails come through and any emails that they compose aren’t sent until the server connection is turned back on. The limited-email policy applies only to staff working under trade union–negotiated contracts and not to senior management. Shortly after Volkswagen adopted the policy, the German Labor Ministry adopted it for its own staff and recommended that other companies follow suit and, at the very least, establish clear guides for staff email usage.20 Even today as some of Volkswagen’s other practices are being called deceitful, the practice of limiting email is catching on in a positive way.
Later, after this announcement in Germany, news came from France that an agreement had been signed between prominent French labor unions and employers in the technology and consulting industries. The agreement covered about 250,000 “autonomous employees” and specified an obligation to disconnect communication tools so that employees would not be interrupted during their time off from the office. The employees affected were exempt from France’s standard thirty-five-hour workweek and hence worked weekends and sometimes thirteen-hour days. The agreement specified that these employees had to have at least one day off every seven days, with no email communication during their time off.21
Perhaps the most novel anti-email tactic was put into place by the German automaker Daimler. The Volkswagen rival took aim, not at after-hours email, but at vacation email. In 2014 the company installed a new program on its email servers that lets employees select a “Mail on Holiday” out-of-office reply.22 Like traditional out-of-office programs, when an employee receives an email, the sender automatically receives a message that the employee is out of the office and will return on a specified date. Unlike traditional programs, however, the program then notifies the sender that the email will be deleted and requests that the sender either resend it on the employee’s return date or send it to a specified alternative person who is not away from the office. Vacationing employees are spared from seeing (and thinking about) emails during their time off, and often they return to an empty email inbox as well. The program is optional, but available to about 100,000 employees throughout Germany.
Although an after-hours email ban can seem to be just a work-life balance initiative, research suggests that such bans can serve the greater purpose of keeping employees engaged and satisfied with their jobs. Recent research conducted by Marcus Butts, William Becker, and Wendy Boswell shows that people who receive email after work get angry more often than not and that their anger interferes with their personal lives.23
Every day for seven days, the researchers surveyed 341 working adults on their feelings about receiving after-work email. Each day participants received an email sometime between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. with a link to that day’s survey. Participants were instructed to complete the survey while thinking about the email they had received most recently after work hours, and to not complete the survey if they had received no emails after work that day. Participants were surveyed on a variety of items, from their perception of the tone of voice in the email, the time required to respond, the emotions they felt, and whether or not the email affected their nonwork life. They were also surveyed at the very beginning of the study on issues such as their perception of supervisor abuse and their preferences for blending their work and nonwork lives.
When they analyzed the collected data, Marcus Butts and his colleagues found that when employees received an email after work that they perceived as negative in tone, it was more likely to make them angry, decrease their happiness, and affect their nonwork life. When employees received emails they perceived as positive in tone, they were more likely to be happy, but that happiness was only fleeting. Regardless of tone, if responding to the email required a lot of time, it was likely to make employees upset. “The after-hours emails really affected those workers’ personal lives,” said Butts.24 In addition to showing that after-hours emails interfere with employees’ personal lives, the researchers also found a relationship between employees’ perceptions that their supervisor was abusive or micromanaging and the likelihood that reading the email would make them angry.
In short, after-hours email can interfere not only with nonwork relationships but also with work relationships, specifically by increasing any preexisting tension between employees and their bosses. The researchers suggest that managers take these findings seriously and compose after-hours emails with caution, and also that employees who are angered by after-hours emails consider leaving and moving to a company with an email limitation policy (like Atos, el Mejor Trato, Learning as Leadership, or Daimler).
Whether or not company leadership decides to restrict email, limit how often employees check it, or ban it entirely, both the research and the recent experiences of these companies make a strong case that email is not the most effective tool for communication. Beyond interfering with your work-life balance, it can also have a detrimental impact on your productivity. Clearing out your email inbox can make you feel really good—like you’re ultra-productive. But unless your job is to delete emails, time spent in your inbox may not be time spent wisely.
Under New Management Notes
1. Sara Radicati, ed., “Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018,” The Radicati Group (April 2014), http://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Email-Statistics-Report-2014-2018-Executive-Summary.pdf (accessed March 4, 2015).
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2. “Atos Origin Sets Out Its Ambition to Be a Zero Email Company Within Three Years” (press release), Atos Global Newsroom, February 9, 2011, http://atos.net/en-us/home/we-are/news/press-release/2011/pr-2011_02_07_01.html (accessed March 2, 2015).
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3. Thierry Breton, “Atos Boss Thierry Breton Defends His Internal Email Ban,” BBC News, March 8, 2012, http://www.bbc.com
/news/technology-16055310 (accessed March 2, 2015).
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4. Paul Taylor, “Atos’ ‘Zero Email Initiative’ Succeeding,” Financial Times, March 7, 2013.
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5. Andrew Cave, “Evernote Takes on Microsoft and Google,” The Telegraph, May 26, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/11629237/Evernote-takes-on-Microsoft-and-Google.html (accessed May 28, 2015).
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6. Andrew Cave, “Why Silicon Valley Wants Email to Die,” Forbes, May 26, 2015.
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7. Rebecca Greenfield, “Inside the Company That Got Rid of Email,” Fast Company, September 25, 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3035927/agendas/inside-the-company-that-got-rid-of-email (access May 28, 2015).
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8. Radicati, “Email Statistics Report, 2014–2018.”
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9. Gloria J. Mark, Stephen Voida, and Armand V. Cardello, “‘A Pace Not Dictated by Electrons: An Empirical Study of Work Without Email,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2012), 555–64, https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Research_files/CHI%202012.pdf.
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10. Ibid.
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11. Lisa Evans, “You Aren’t Imagining It: Email Is Making You More Stressed Out,” Fast Company, September 24, 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3036061/the-future-of-work/you-arent-imagining-it-email-is-making-you-more-stressed-out (accessed March 4, 2015).
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