How Email Causes Meetings

Let’s say you are a major corporation and about to invest millions of dollars in a new mission-critical tool and infrastructure that every employee will use. Would you simply give it to every employee and tell them to use it however they want? Probably not.

Now let’s say that everyone is using that tool to communicate, but often people tell you that they can’t see the work that you entered into the system. Worse yet, there are bad guys who are using your system to try to deceive your employees and customers and to co-opt your employees into buying illegal or fraudulent merchandise.

The system is email of course – email being the largest system in the world where people have no established process flow or guidance on its daily use in business. Furthermore, try to change how people use email by setting a process flow or user standards and many will feel offended that you are messing with ‘their’ tool.

We are driven to email for daily communications. As business spans locations, cultures, and time zones, email has both allowed and supported our ability to work with people in distant locations. Yet for all its attributes, email is struggling to meet many critical business needs, including clear and reliable communications.

So what do these shortcomings of email cause?

Your Attention Please

Communication requires the attention of both parties. Email’s message reliability is flawed by unclear writing, spam filters, people ignoring it, people reading only the first eight lines, mass deletions after out-of-office time, poor comprehension due to reading emails while multitasking, too many emails in your inbox effectively hiding important messages in plain sight. People who need to reliably communicate have to find a better way.

So what is required to "force" attention? Get the person live on the phone or into a meeting. With today’s distributed and Internetworked teams, we're generally talking about getting the attention of at least several people. As a result, teleconferences rule the business scene. The more unread and unreliable the email, the more meetings need to be called.

Unfortunately, corporate meetings are starting to exhibit the same bad practices as email. People have overloaded meeting schedules which means they selectively attend to their own priorities instead of the priorities of the persons calling the meetings. Due to spotty attendance and participant multi-tasking, meetings have become just as ineffective as emails. The result? People are now overloaded with email and meetings.

Reducing Meetings by Attacking Bad Email Practices

First, let’s attack email with a few simple but challenging steps that we have talked about before.  Most critical is to write and implement a set of rules about the use of email. A simple 10 point agreement will do. It needs to address length, TO lists, CC lists, BCC lists, REPLY-ALL, how actions are handled, and a few other common productivity busters. Contact us and we’ll send a sample of a simple email operating agreement.

Second, you need to move project communications out of email and into a shared workspace such as BaseCamp, SharePoint, Groove, or any of many available products. Using these for project communications changes the responsibility of the communications from the sender-only to a shared responsibility between the sender and the recipient. If the message is on a team-accessible board, the excuse of ‘I didn’t get the email’ can no longer be used. It is the recipient’s responsibility to go to the shared space and find the messages. It is also crystal clear if the message was posted – as opposed to email where there is sometimes a question if the email was sent.

Third is meeting hygiene (not alcohol wipes although I’ve seen many phones that could use a swipe). Meeting hygiene is the basics that you have been taught for in-person meetings including agendas, meeting minutes, action items, and holding people accountable for showing up and what happens in the meeting.

For teleconferences and virtual meetings in addition to the above, it means introductions, saying your name before your speak, the facilitator using a touch-sheet to insure that everyone weighs in on topics and decisions, and protocols that allow everyone to participate in the meeting. 

An aspect of many teleconference systems is that only two or three peoples’ voices are transmitted at any one time with the others automatically muted. You all know how hard it is to break into a teleconference when you are a satellite location or there is a heated discussion at one conference site. You need a protocol to have everyone heard and to let the remote folks get into the discussion. If the remote participants do not natively speak the language of the meeting, then this need to facilitate participation is supercritical.

Fix All That?

What I have outlined is a tall order and requires challenging organizational changes and takes time. It needs to be a project, have sponsors, and have a realistic plan. You can’t just say ‘let’s reduce emails’ and expect results. But on the plus side, you might gain back over an hour a day from each employee.

Sponsor’s Moment

In medium to large businesses, we can reduce your email and time spent in meetings by as much as 50%. Often, a 20% reduction in both numbers of email and time spent in meetings being accomplished in 60 days. For more information, please contact Dennis Smith at 508-278-7570 or visit us at www.StrategiesInPlay.com

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