JCMC: The Discussion Section

Nicole Ellison 0:00
ICA Presents

Welcome to JCMC: The Discussion Section, produced by the International Communication Association Podcast Network. I'm Nicole Ellison. I'm very pleased to have as our guest today Linda Duxbury. Linda teaches management and strategy in change management at the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the coauthor of a recently published paper in JCMC titled Measurement of Perceived Importance and Urgency of Email: an Employees’ Perspective. Linda was gracious enough to join me here to talk a bit about the paper and to maybe think a bit about what some of the implications of it might be for those of us who are struggling with things like email overload. So welcome, Linda.

Linda Duxbury 0:58
Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here.

Nicole Ellison 1:01
Could you give us for our readers who haven't had a chance to read the paper yet a brief overview of some of the more relevant and interesting findings and research questions?

Linda Duxbury 1:12
So if I give you a little bit of history. I work in the area of employee wellbeing and stress. And I've gotten a lot of data saying that email is a massive stressor for a lot of people, especially if they're working for an organization who expects 24/7 availability. And so we were very interested in trying to figure out how the recipient of that email or the sender, how do they classify the emails they're sending in terms of importance and urgent, because we thought that if we knew how important and urgent something was, we could predict how often people use email and we could, make suggestions that would help people more easily balance work, life, all the demands, improve their well being. What we did was we talked to a bunch of knowledge workers, we asked them to identify, how did they know if an email was important? And how did they know if it was urgent? What really surprised us was people were pretty clear about important emails, but urgency is a much more fuzzy concept. I think probably the thing that surprised me the most or that was the most interesting, and the most useful from a practitioner point of view was any message that comes from your boss or your boss's boss is considered urgent and important, which means that managers should take a little bit more care before they fire off messages willy nilly late in the evening and on weekends, because the recipient of that if they're under them in the hierarchy will immediately hop to it and reply and that's not fair.

Nicole Ellison 2:58
I know that many European countries in particular have much more, some might say humane rules and norms around sending and expectations of replying to emails on non-work hours.

Linda Duxbury 3:15
What is interesting is they have policies in place, but policies make very little difference because how do you enforce them? We all make judgments about our email use based on our own experience, and we don't really listen to the government. I think that's pretty well global.

Nicole Ellison 3:34
And I think there is this sense that responding to an email in some corporate cultures after hours on weekends right away, that that is a signal of more organizational loyalty or that work is more important to you than someone who isn't. I think it's so important to think about what that means for anyone who doesn't necessarily have that flexibility.

Linda Duxbury 4:03
We call it the culture of 24/7. What we find is that people who respond and send all the time, and are constantly available, tend to get to the middle or the top of the organization and perpetuate these bad behaviors, which are not that good for people. During the pandemic, it's gotten completely out of control. It's a real problem.

Nicole Ellison 4:25
I know that a lot of systems now do have a kind of send later option. I think this could be one strategy that's the best of both worlds.

Linda Duxbury 4:33
I think that that's a really good idea. That, though, is based on the assumption that we would love to be true, but it's not always that people haven't left things to the last minute. We're all guilty of it. But you're bad planning doesn't constitute an emergency on my part. But if that's what our research said, though, it can constitute an emergency if it's your boss who's bad planning is resulting in you getting a message.

Nicole Ellison 5:02
I'm curious if you could speculate a bit on how some of your findings and the literature might apply to other channels that employees use, especially as we see more use of things like Slack in organizational settings.

Linda Duxbury 5:17
What was very interesting was people see text as something that you use with your friends and your family. They do not see it as a way of communicating legitimately with people at work. When they look at how people think of business communication, they still think of email.

Nicole Ellison 5:38
In this study, you look at urgent versus importance of emails. Can you say a little bit about that distinction? And why these are relevant concepts for this sort of question?

Linda Duxbury 5:51
Important is “it's going to hurt my job, it’s going to hurt somebody else's job, it's going to hurt my client.” People were able to articulate importance, but urgency, we didn't identify it as a construct of its own. We thought it would be all about time sensitivity, but that's how many people see importance. Urgency was really based on who sent it. We couldn't find many examples of an email that was urgent, but also not important. We often talk about the urgent overtaking the important. And that's because higher ups in the organization often abuse email and what they're requesting and how quickly they're requesting it.

Nicole Ellison 6:46
What sort of strategies or techniques would you suggest for people who are feeling overwhelmed, and that email is one of the sources of that feeling?

Linda Duxbury 6:49
We definitely found there's a construct in the academic literature called email overload. So overload is feeling overwhelmed having too much to do in the amount of time you have to do it in feeling rushed, feeling stressed, and the constant coming in of email and the constant pressures. So if you're constantly responding to email, our data in another study we did shows, if you're responding within 5, 10 minutes of getting it, people keep sending to you, and they ignore the people who don't respond right away. If you don't control it, it overtakes your life. So I use Sunday evening, to actually clean up my email. So I start each week with a new slate of in-basket. I'm very determined about that, because it's important. You know students don't plan well, and then their crisis becomes your crisis. So I'm very clear to my students here, if you send me an email, if you're lucky, I will answer right away, but do not expect that I will answer in anything less than 24 hours. So plan accordingly. Don't start at the last minute expect me to answer because it's not going to happen. We know from a lot of the cognitive psychology literature, that people can get addicted to email, like you get a little dopamine rush. Some people use it as a way to procrastinate. So I think you have to be disciplined yourself, I think you have to make your rules very clear to the people who communicate with you and rely on you. I think you have to have the will to follow through on your own rules.

Nicole Ellison 8:35
For myself, one of the things that I think happens is that I sometimes feel like if I can respond right away, the expectation for how long or thoughtful the email will be much more minimal than if after a week I write back. And then it's the expectation that it's a much longer and lengthy and more time consuming message that I'm sending back. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that as a strategy. It's probably not a good one.

Linda Duxbury 9:08
We've all been there. Everybody jumps on and answers, answers, answers, it gets crazy. And then it takes on a life of its own. So often, they give you the advice, never reply to something when you're angry. I also take the advice of never just knee jerk give a response to something. I wait, unless it's something really minor, in which case, I'll do it.

Nicole Ellison 9:34
I'm wondering whether there are gender differences or power differences in the extent to which people feel the obligation to get back quickly.

Linda Duxbury 9:45
My guess is there's a degree or an element of your personality that actually allows you to just ignore something. There's so many ways of measuring personality. There's conscientiousness, there's neuroticism. My guess is the people high on neuroticism are constantly answering. It could be position. I think there's a whole bunch of literature saying that people use responding to email as image management. Not because the message is important, or urgent, but they're managing their impressions upward. And we found that it's who really dominates with power, you immediately answer.

Nicole Ellison 10:31
I would speculate that it also is probably not a great strategy to have only one email account that everyone is sending stuff to, as opposed to a work email account and then other accounts for other people in your life. That seems to me to be another way to potentially segment out some of these different kinds of tasks and not just the expectations that they might have for how quickly you'll respond to them but your own interest in getting that email at that time.

Linda Duxbury 11:10
I say to people do not ever check your work related email when you're on holiday. I have perfected over three years, I say, “I am going on holiday. I don't check my email on holiday. I know that many of the issues, you're emailing me back, here's the person to go to. I know many of these issues will be resolved. If it's important, please, resend on this date. Be aware I delete my in-basket on my return without reading.” It's about discipline, Nicole. And then it took me a year to train my people who email me a lot. They would say, “You didn't respond”. And I say, “You didn't read. My message was extremely clear. You want me to respond after my holiday, send it again.” I actually live what I preach. If it's a personal thing that I want to attend to, they will text me. So a text I will take always, but an email I won't.

Nicole Ellison 12:20
Sure and a text that's synchronous does have that affordance as well. There is a little bit more of an expectation as opposed to email, which I think still is in this kind of gray area because it's technically an asynchronous medium, but the expectations and norms are such that sometimes it feels much more synchronous.

Linda Duxbury 12:45
It's a perception thing. And so the first person you've got to control is you. The first person that you have to have talking to about how to manage this technology is you. There's all kinds of great tools out there. But there are only tools that are impactful if somebody uses them.

Nicole Ellison 13:05
Are there any insights that we didn't touch on that you feel would be good for folks to know about from this work?

Linda Duxbury 13:13
I think the next thing to study about the negative impacts on work life and employee well being is Zoom, Teams, all of these kinds of things. We've surveyed 33,000 Canadians during the pandemic, what people say is, their life now is back to back meetings with no time scheduled for a break between them, not even for a biological break. Because the technology makes things possible, we have to really start factoring in the possible good for us. I would really encourage people to look at Zoom, look at Teams, look at all these new things. Not from a technology perspective, but from an impact on people's perspective. And it's interesting. The number of meetings increased dramatically during the pandemic, the amount of time between meetings reduced to zero. And each meeting was shorter. So we're mentally having to do way more gymnastics than we ever did before. And hey, we don't have the time to look at our email unless we shut off our camera and do it while we're supposed to be attending to the meeting. Technology is a curse and a blessing.

Nicole Ellison 14:33
Well, thank you so much, Linda, for taking the time to share your thoughts about this important issue with me and the listeners of JCMC: The Discussion Section.

Linda Duxbury 14:42
And thank you very much for (a) inviting me to do this podcast and (b) for accepting the publication. So the first author Andre Lanctot, he's a PhD student and this was a very big hit for him, certainly will help him get a great job. So thank you on behalf of both of us.

Nicole Ellison 15:10
JCMC: The Discussion Section is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Jacqueline Colarusso. Our Executive Producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Nicholas Rowe. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, the articles we discussed and JCMC: The Discussion Section overall. Thanks for listening!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai