Before the days of the Internet and email the main means of business communication was by post. Everyday correspondence on contract negotiations or disputes would be delivered every morning. The mail room and its staff and distribution system was a critical business function. It paid to know the mail operatives and be friends with them if you ever wanted favours like an overseas courier arranged late in the day. We still of course have post rooms though because there are a few critical items sent by “snail mail” and businesses like individuals order products online which are delivered by couriers. So, a new phone or accessory will still need some system to distribute them through offices.
However, pre Gmail and Microsoft Office matters generally moved slower driven by the speed of the communications medium - even faxes would arrive at a far more sedate pace than emails or IM’s and sending really long contracts by them was impractical. This sounds hard to believe these days of 24/7 always on, but it did have advantages. It gave professionals more time to think and the opportunity to see what was happening and to manage, control and supervise work and communications with clients or other professionals. In some legal practices the partners and senior lawyers would all sit down first thing in the morning and open and distribute the post which gave them a good understanding of progress on individual matters – and also when problems might be occurring.
Nowadays it is much more challenging to manage communications in a professional practice where everybody from the post room staff to the senior partner has their own email address. A junior professional can send out advice by email (or IM or even Text) without it being as easy to require a review by a more senior person, which was far easier to arrange with a letter of advice. You can find lots of advice about how to manage individual emails and mailboxes but far less on the content of the communication. There is software that will to apply automatic email rules to block messages that contain information that should never leave your company’s building, including sensitive data or offensive language - see, for example, this product. There is far less advice on offer about how to ensure communications are at an appropriate professional level. I think it comes down to organisations setting appropriate rules and standards.
Letters also created less stress. There was time to consider; the quickest you could send a respond was by the evening’s post. As a result, there is far more material on the challenge of being managed by emailand equivalent communications. See this Harvard Business Review article 6 Ways to Set Boundaries Around Email which comments Email is no longer just email: messages are sent across dozens of platforms, and people now field text messages, Instagram DM’s, Slack alerts, Voxer messages, Facebook inboxes, and more. The world is full of bids for our attention, and we get stuck in the loop of answering messages, putting in longer hours to “catch up.” But if we shift to answering emails at all times, we shift to receiving emails at all times, a vicious problem.
Or this piece from the same journal Stop Letting Email Control Your Work Day which states Email in particular is a major contributor to employees’ perceptions of feeling stressed or overwhelmed, according to a 2011 study. In their research, the authors concluded that the email inbox itself has become a symbol of stress and overload. Combine that with a 2012 McKinsey report that found employees spend approximately 28% of their time in the office responding to, reading, or composing emails. The average person checks his or her email upwards of seventy times per day, and on the high end that number approaches 350 times!
As Noreena Hertz the English academic, economist, author said Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
And sometimes, just sometimes actually meeting up for a negotiation or a management meeting achieves far more than an exchange of twenty or more emails. Charles Dickens of all people commented Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.
However, pre Gmail and Microsoft Office matters generally moved slower driven by the speed of the communications medium - even faxes would arrive at a far more sedate pace than emails or IM’s and sending really long contracts by them was impractical. This sounds hard to believe these days of 24/7 always on, but it did have advantages. It gave professionals more time to think and the opportunity to see what was happening and to manage, control and supervise work and communications with clients or other professionals. In some legal practices the partners and senior lawyers would all sit down first thing in the morning and open and distribute the post which gave them a good understanding of progress on individual matters – and also when problems might be occurring.
Nowadays it is much more challenging to manage communications in a professional practice where everybody from the post room staff to the senior partner has their own email address. A junior professional can send out advice by email (or IM or even Text) without it being as easy to require a review by a more senior person, which was far easier to arrange with a letter of advice. You can find lots of advice about how to manage individual emails and mailboxes but far less on the content of the communication. There is software that will to apply automatic email rules to block messages that contain information that should never leave your company’s building, including sensitive data or offensive language - see, for example, this product. There is far less advice on offer about how to ensure communications are at an appropriate professional level. I think it comes down to organisations setting appropriate rules and standards.
Letters also created less stress. There was time to consider; the quickest you could send a respond was by the evening’s post. As a result, there is far more material on the challenge of being managed by emailand equivalent communications. See this Harvard Business Review article 6 Ways to Set Boundaries Around Email which comments Email is no longer just email: messages are sent across dozens of platforms, and people now field text messages, Instagram DM’s, Slack alerts, Voxer messages, Facebook inboxes, and more. The world is full of bids for our attention, and we get stuck in the loop of answering messages, putting in longer hours to “catch up.” But if we shift to answering emails at all times, we shift to receiving emails at all times, a vicious problem.
Or this piece from the same journal Stop Letting Email Control Your Work Day which states Email in particular is a major contributor to employees’ perceptions of feeling stressed or overwhelmed, according to a 2011 study. In their research, the authors concluded that the email inbox itself has become a symbol of stress and overload. Combine that with a 2012 McKinsey report that found employees spend approximately 28% of their time in the office responding to, reading, or composing emails. The average person checks his or her email upwards of seventy times per day, and on the high end that number approaches 350 times!
As Noreena Hertz the English academic, economist, author said Email is having an increasingly pernicious effect. Not only is it having a perceptible effect on productivity, it's skewing what it is we focus on. The immediate increasingly crowds out the important.
And sometimes, just sometimes actually meeting up for a negotiation or a management meeting achieves far more than an exchange of twenty or more emails. Charles Dickens of all people commented Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.
RSS Feed
