YOUR EMAIL ATTITUDE: ARE YOU “RELAXED”, “DRIVEN” OR “STRESSED”? – Best Practice #5
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A simple classification based on our attitude toward email helps us see a surprising source of email stress – synchronicity! What type are you? An email-related stress study (see end of article) from the UK uncovered three dominant attitudes toward email:
We see many business people in the “driven” category but we also see too many who fit the “stressed” profile – not only does email not work for them, it causes workplace stress. “Relaxed” is out there, but certainly less common. We find this simple classification based on attitude very helpful because positive change so often starts with understanding our own attitude and emotions. What creates stress? Synchronous communication! Asynchronous communication is non-interactive – you use email mostly for exchanging factual information (much like one does in a letter). It is comparatively stress-free. Synchronous communication is interactive – used for discussions, reviewing options, and nuance typically involving lots of back and forth (topics more suited for a telephone call). Pressure and stress increase with interactivity. We tell clients email is not well suited for synchronous (highly interactive) communication to help increase their overall communication effectiveness. This is the first study we have found that speaks to the added pressure and stress synchronous email causes. It’s a reasonable guess that the anxiety comes from both the need to respond and having to manage more and longer email conversations. What’s the best practice? Simple. If you are feeling pressured or stressed with email, consider using other communication channels for some of your email. Identify the email conversations in your Inbox that are failing or losing focus and recast them into personal meetings or telephone calls. In general, try to use email for the more non-interactive (factual-type items) and other channels for anything you think is discussion-oriented, potentially emotional, sensitive, or which may lead to many emails (e.g., more than 3). But let’s be realistic too. It’s simply impractical to achieve this across the board. However, if you can shift your attitude even a little – even to just recognize that email doesn’t work for all communication types – we believe your stress level may just shift along with it. About the study To see the study click “The influence of self-esteem and locus of control on perceived email-related stress” (M. Hair – University of Paisley; K.V. Renaud – University of Glasgow; J. Ramsay – University of Paisley – 2006). The study is interesting and goes well beyond what I took from it to press my case above. As the title suggests, it set out to measure two specific personality traits related to email stress. The three-fold typology (relaxed, driven, stressed) surfaced as dimensions from the exploratory factor analysis that was conducted (and it was deemed statistically reliable). One interesting result: it was found that low self-esteem is associated with the “driven” orientation. |
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Does your research take into consideration what your respondents do all day in addition to dealing with e-mail? Is it the case that people whose job requires them to spend most of their time at their desks have a different relationship to e-mail than those who spend most of their working day in non-office environments (e.g. factory floor or other production facility, broadly defined)? The latter group tends to deal with email in short breaks between what they see as their main duties. More complex and time-consuming email messages normally have to be dealt with outside working hours. Is there any correlation between these different work patterns and the three attitude categories which you define?
Thanks for your question Ann. The research wasn’t mine (see the references at the end of the piece). I was drawing parallels to my observations as an email effectiveness trainer.
That said, here’s a snip from the article:
6.3. Frequency of email use
The three underlying factors were not related to frequency of email use. Respondents were asked how frequently they actively checked their emails. Fig. 1 shows the reported frequencies. 64.3% reported that they checked emails more than once an hour while 34.3% checked every 15 min or less. There was no correlation between any of the factors and frequency of checking (r = .02 for ‘relaxed’ and ‘driven’ and .04 for ‘stressed’, n = 137). However, as previous research has noted (Renaud et al., 2006), self-reported data on frequency of usage may not be reliable, since people may actually check emails far more often than they realise. Furthermore, it may be that predispositions towards email may be associated less with the activity of checking itself and more with the perception of need to respond.
Tom