Can a training prescription cure the email disease?

Why has a solution to the “email problem”  still not been found  – despite it still being the main way that we communicate in business?

Email overload comes up time after time in staff surveys as one of the main causes of stress and anxiety in the workplace.

There are 0.825 billion business email accounts currently active which send and receive 89 billion emails every day. A staggering statistic!

So – what can be done to make email more manageable?

Some recent academic research jointly commissioned by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Emailogic looked at how email stress can be tackled.

Emailogic showed managers the skills and techniques they needed to deal with email overload and manage and prioritise their inboxes effectively. The impact of the Emailogic course was measured by an independent expert in well-being both at the time the training took place and one month later.

As well as monitoring the experience of those who attended training, the study included two control groups: colleagues who were sent email etiquette guidelines to read, and another group who received neither training nor guidelines.

The managers who attended the training clearly benefited from the programme compared to their colleagues in the two control groups. The results clearly showed that staff who attended email training reported a statistically significant improvement in their well-being and performance.

Staynton Brown, Associate Director at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust was emphatic in his praise for the course and had no hesitation in recommending the course.

Simply reading guidelines did NOT have the same impact on people’s wellbeing and productivity –whether or not the managers actually read them!

What was evident during the study was that to actually change behaviour around email a training intervention was needed.