5 ways email costs your company

​What is attention management and how does it affect productivity?

Is email still considered an innovative scaffolding tool in your office, or cutting out valuable productivity from your day-to-day routine? Does online communication stress your intellectual knowledge to the limits? Could the office stress you feel stem from not being allowed to slowly think through a process and come up with better solutions? What are the burnout factors from technology, and how has email complicated it?

TIP of the week comes from Maura Thomas, an award-winning productivity and time management speaker. She is a nationally recognized expert delivering her unique message that the key to productivity and effectiveness is attention management. Thomas, in her article 5 ways email costs your company dives into 5 common mistakes leaders make. Mistakes that “sabotage team productivity by failing to explicitly set expectations around email communication” :

• Leaders treat email as a synchronous tool
• Speed of response becomes an inadvertent metric
• Leaders don’t allow team members to unleash their genius
• Leaders communicate via email 24/7
• Leaders don’t realize that after-hours emails hurt families

Traditional methods that allowed you to mentally think through a transition slowly have been systematically replaced with applications like TEAMS or ZOOM meetings that require instant replies. Memorizing things in the short term does not mean success in the long term. Not everyone will succeed at the same pace or desire to.

It’s important to help your employees with, “unleashing their genius.” “Unleash the brainpower you hired them for in the first place” notes Thomas.

unleashing their genius

Thomas provides her thoughts on creating a company communication policy to help alleviate miscommunication and help leaders sort out and treat email as an asynchronous tool. “Asynchronous communication platforms are those on which we might pose a question and don’t expect an instant reply.”

Asynchronous communication platforms are those on which we might pose a question and don’t expect an instant reply