Why you should no longer send internal emails

More than 50 years ago, the first email was sent - but still within a local network. The programmer Ray Tomlinson sent a message from one network to another in 1971. The distance was only three metres of network cable, but it still marked an enormous step. (1) A lot has happened since then, and with the development and popularisation of the internet in the 1980s, email has also become part of everyday life. The change in communication can certainly be described as a quantum leap. The written exchange of information, which used to take days by letter, could now occur in a fraction of a second and across continents.

The triumph of email can be illustrated by the following figures. In 2021, an incredible 8.6 billion emails per day were sent  in the UK. In the USA it is about 10 billion emails per day and in Germany about 8.9 billion.(2) Especially in the professional environment, email has developed into THE means of communication.

So an absolute success story?

Sounds like a success story? From an email perspective this may be true, but in many companies managers and numerous other employees are literally drowning in emails. There are several reasons for this.

1. One advantage of email becomes a disadvantage. It is so easy to send an email to many senders or to distribute information to many different recipients that no consideration is given to the relevance of the content to the recipients.

2. Malicious emails are recognised by most email providers and automatically sorted out. However, marketing emails and other spam often still reach the inboxes. This too must be sorted out and consumes attention and time.

3. It has become the norm to send a copy of the email to all colleagues who are remotely related to the content ("CC mails"). As a result, inboxes continue to fill up and these emails also have to be read in order to at least be able to assess whether they contain relevant information for one's own person.

Various studies prove this problem:

An extrapolation of the Henley Management College on email communication among European managers comes to an eye-opening conclusion:

Managers spend about 3.5 years of their working lives dealing with irrelevant emails. (3)

If you take into account the average salary of management employees, it becomes clear what a financial impact this has on a company.

The problem of irrelevant content is particularly pronounced in relation to emails within one's own organisation, as a study by the University of Western Ontario proves:

46% of all internal emails sent via distribution lists and the all-reply function that arrive in employees' inboxes are irrelevant to the recipient's own work. (3)

As if that were not enough reasons to turn away from (internal) email, there are other disadvantages to the use of email.

What emails are not capable of

Emails have a time limit that makes it necessary to create a second "storage location" or medium for important messages. This time period is shorter than one might think at first glance. Check for yourself how quickly an email in your inbox "disappears from the radar" if you do not mark it additionally or search for it specifically.

Furthermore, email inboxes are usually not generally accessible and all the knowledge collected in the inboxes is lost when a colleague leaves.

Former Wordpress manager Scott Berkun describes it this way in Fast Company:

Email decays over time. If someone writes a great email, an employee has to do something to preserve it. Otherwise it sits in an inbox, hidden from new employees. Over time, that organizational knowledge fades away.

The shortcomings of email have only been exacerbated by the pandemic because it has replaced too much. Decisions that used to be made by talking at a colleague's desk have become a ping-pong game in the inbox.

Others describe how answering a flood of emails causes them to lose sight of other tasks, creating a cycle that is at best unproductive and at worst damaging to business.

How to do it better - the way out of the misery

The gloomy picture of communication by email in the professional environment should not invite resignation, because there are solutions on how to make communication more productive and less overwhelming.

In this context, emails will not be completely banned in the foreseeable future. Especially in communication with external partners, email will continue to play a role and have its justification. Most of the relief will come from the centralisation of internal communication. This can be supported by figures from an email study conducted by the TU Freiburg in 2008:

Around two thirds of all emails received by employees come from internal senders.

How do you achieve centralised internal communication?

Different approaches and tools to improve communication have an overlap, they use the network or platform character. They use approaches that are already familiar from social media platforms, forums, etc. in the privat domain.

1. All employees can become members of defined groups and are notified about new messages.

2. For quick dialogue, an informal chat message via an integrated chat is mostly used.

3. Messages in group format, e.g. on pinboards, are persistent and visible to everyone. This preserves knowledge.

4. Knowledge and information in group communication is searchable. In this way, knowledge transfer can succeed.

5. Discussions on a topic take place with the participation of necessary people in a comprehensible format.

6. Good solutions allow tasks to be created and tracked.

Part of the cultural change is that in future employees will be more in the debt of fetching and retrieving relevant information from accessible media. This means that they get the relevant information as soon as it is needed and do not have to wait for someone to write to them. This requires initiative, but an increased motivation can be observed, as there is higher self-efficacy and no more frustration of more and more irrelevant messages.

The implementation requires a change in thinking on the part of senders and recipients and has to be learned. Processes are critically questioned and adapted to the new communication patterns. However, the advantages are unmistakable. It is worth taking the step towards centralised communication and finally leaving overflowing inboxes behind.

Please feel free to book an appointment with one of our experts to get to know our solution in order to centralise your communication. We look forward to the exchange.