A "lack of communication"?

Every traditional training course ends with someone duly writing down that they needed to improve communication, Nearly every business and team problem is put down to a “lack of communication”,

In our training we learned that the problem was not too little communication but too much. People in complex organizations attend irrelevant meetings, listen to unproductive conference calls and delete dozens of unnecessary email every day. Communication consumes at least 70% of management time, and half of this is wasted.

Just one example - an organization of 10,000 people receiving 75 emails per day each (a typical level for our clients) generates 170 Million emails per year – to put this in perspective, if we printed each email on a single sheet of paper (excluding attachments) the pile would stretch 30% higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial airplane.

An internal survey in one of our clients estimated that they spend 20% of all staff time on emails. If one issue is consuming such a high proportion of your time, it is certainly worth managing. Despite this, few companies have anyone focusing on this issue.

We asked participants on our training courses about their emails. The discussion is invariably a heated one.

They received an average of 75 emails per day

25% were deleted without ever being read
10% contained information that they really needed or should act on.
65% were emails that “one day might come in useful”

The “one day might come in useful” emails were a mixture of distribution lists, copies of mails to other people, project and meeting activity updates etc…

In each case, participants could think of few instances when these emails were necessary for them to do their jobs. When we challenge them to get themselves off these distribution lists their answers include; “One day there might be something useful there”,” I am expected to be up to date on this stuff”,” “I can always go back and look if I want to check something (but I never actually do so).” Most reported a sense of guilt if they had not checked and read their emails.

Step one of improving communication is to disconnect yourself from these messages, they take up a lot of your time and they contain information you do not need to receive.

Here are out top 3 tips for dealing with email

First - Disconnect from time wasting sources of emails. If it does not lead to an action you probably don’t need it. If they did not send it directly to you, you probably don’t need it.

Second - Don’t use “Reply to all”, think about who needs to know

Third - Don’t feed it – send and respond to fewer emails and you will get less back

And yes, you will sometimes make a mistake and miss something. We think it is worth taking the risk in order to win back all the time you will save.

For more tips on communicating through technology, see our booklet in the resources section of this web site