Is spending time in email lowering productivity?

If you are out of the inbox, your whole organisation slows down.

Or does it?

What if we've softened the edges of what really is our actual work, due to the ongoing chatter.

It’s not just a case of voicemails, faxes (remember them!) and memos now being emails. We’ve completely changed the workflow to get things done.

Quickly delegating actions, asking others questions, and passing them things to read may feel streamlined, but is it less productive in terms of time and money in the long run?

Companies gather a group of networked brains together and assume that will create high value.

We think of our team members as being autonomous. Giving them clear objectives and motivational leadership, and thinking that’s enough. How they get their work done is rarely considered. Whether we should be messaging each other all day every day, about anything, is rarely questioned, by anybody!

Junior or new members of a team will mirror the behaviours of managers and leaders when it comes to their own workflow. It can be like the blind leading the blind.

"Boxed in by your Inbox" a paper in The Journal of Applied Psychology in 2019 stated, "When managers are the ones trying to recover from email interruptions , they fail to meet their goals, they neglect manager-responsibilities and their subordinates don’t have the leadership behaviour needed to thrive"

Competitive edge may come from replacing some of the existing workflow with more brain-friendly processes.

This could be, less context switching between talking about the work and doing the work. Allowing the big brain work when people are feeling at their freshest in the day. Allowing employees to openly challenge the status quo, for the sake of personal and team productivity.