‘Electronic leash’: How the office email is taking over our lives

Incessant messaging from work can whack the psychological wellbeing of employees, something France has aimed to tackled with a new law. For the rest of us it remains a blight on timeout

There is a huge difference between “We don’t expect you to check your email” and “We expect you not to check your email (Shutterstock)

Whether it’s office email, collaborative apps or the break-room noticeboard, internal workplace communications have the potential to go very wrong, very quickly.

Google engineer James Damore recently found this out to his cost after colleagues leaked a memo he’d shared about the company’s approach to diversity, leading to his eventual dismissal.

Of course, misjudged workplace missives are hardly new. Even your out-of-office message can go viral if you’re not careful.

But now that Google – the supppsedly progressive, convention-busting organisation we rely on to organise the world’s information – finds itself at the centre of its own workplace communications scandal, it is a perfect time to rethink the whole thing.

Google engineer James Damore is said to have copied in 40,000 colleagues

Recent attempts to address this have focused on when we communicate at work, rather than how. It’s eight months since France passed the “right to disconnect law”, making it illegal for employers to email staff out of office hours. The idea was to tackle work-related stress and bring an end to the “electronic leash” as one French lawmaker put it.

Six years before, Volkswagen agreed to stop emailing its employees outside of office hours. In 2014 Daimler, another German car manufacturer, introduced a voluntary policy that enabled staff to auto-delete emails they receive while on vacation. The sender instead received a variation of this response: “I am on vacation. I cannot read your email. Your email is being deleted. Please contact Hans or Monika if it’s really important, or resend the email after I’m back in the office.”

The right to disconnect has only been law in France since January, so it’s too soon to judge its impact. But Volkswagen workers spokesman Jörg Köther claimed in 2014 that his company’s measure had been well-received. He attributed its success to the policy’s “no bypass” mechanism, essential to remove the temptation for workers to log back in.

Volkswagen in Germany instituted a ban on out-of-office emails in 2011

Daimler reported success with staff too. Spokesman Oliver Wihofszki told the BBC: “The response is basically 99 per cent positive, because everybody says: ‘That’s a real nice thing, I would love to have that too’”.

Most of us are guilty of checking in with work too often. Last year a survey by HR Magazine found that 34 per cent of employees checked their email immediately after waking up in the morning and 38 per cent did so every night, just before bed. According to one cyber-security consultancy found that two in 10 office workers responded to work emails even after retiring to bed.

Some organisations encourage this toxic fixation. Erika Nardini, chief executive of Barstool Sports, admitted texting employees on a Sunday just to see how quickly they responded. Compelling employees to switch off is a good start. But there’s a long way to go.

A mindful approach

Gianluca Leone, director of myrooms.co.uk, a management company for flatsharers in London, tries to find a middle ground between disabling email and allowing free rein. “We have a system for monitoring our customer service email address and everyone knows who’s picking up those emails at any given time,” he says. “During peak season we have support staff to serve clients in other time zones. Our staff know when we expect them to be offline and they do appreciate the clarity.”

The difference between “we don’t expect you to check your email” and “we expect you not to check your email”, is crucial.

Of course, completely disallowing out-of-hours emails won’t work for all businesses. We need flexibility. Discouraging overuse is fine, but let’s take a more mindful approach to internal communications in general.

For a start, organisations should discourage the arbitrary copying of people into emails. This habit erodes trust and controversial messages spread like wildfire.

Google’s Damore is said to have copied in 40,000 colleagues to his memo which criticised the company’s diversity policy. They then swarmed to Blind – an app that facilitates anonymous workplace gossip – to call for his dismissal. What if he had simply spoken to Google’s new diversity chief in person? It could have been a conversation instead of a “manifesto” that caused a global hand-wringing over corporate approaches to equality.

Younger people are moving away from email towards workplace messenger applications like Slack or Google Docs

We should get up and speak to our colleagues whenever we can. The benefits are well-documented. So I’d celebrate any initiative to discourage emailing all colleagues, whether remote or at the next desk.

Other channels bear consideration too. Email is losing popularity among younger people. Some 37 per cent of startups no longer view it as their main comms channel, favouring collaborative platforms like Slack and Google Docs. These tools are ripe for overuse, designed to facilitate group-wide communication from a smartphone. What could go wrong?

Some businesses have already spotted the risks. A fashion startup in London has an unusual way of discouraging extra-curricular Slack usage, assigning those guilty of it to the morning coffee-run as punishment.

Overuse of workplace communication is linked to a reduction in mental wellbeing, so clear policies such as those developed by Volkswagen and the French government are essential. It means employees aren’t left guessing about what’s expected of them.

When companies have experimented with unlimited paid vacation, letting employees decide how much time off they took, staff end up working more, not less. The same is true of communications. Without restrictions, employees risk drowning in information.

Flexibility and a culture of openness are valuable to any organisation. But organisations that embrace openness have a duty to protect their staff from the risks, both to their wellbeing and to their careers, of being able to communicate so easily with so many.

Cary Cooper is a 50th Anniversary professor of organisational psychology and health at the University of Manchester. This article was originally published on The Conversation (theconversation.com)