09/08/2021

What to do When Emails, Video Calls Bring People Down

Email tip no. 1: Reduce volume, length and cc’ing redundancies

Collaborative work — time spent on email, IM, phone, and video calls — has risen 50 percent or more over the past decade to consume 85 percent or more of most people’s work weeks. The COVID-19 pandemic caused this figure to take another sharp upward tick, with people spending more time each week in shorter and more fragmented meetings, with voice and video call times doubling and IM traffic increasing by 65 percent. And to make matters worse, collaboration demands are moving further into the evening and are beginning earlier in the morning.

These demands, which can be invisible to managers, are hurting organizations' efforts to become more agile and innovative. And they can lead to individual career derailment, burnout and declines in physical and mental well-being.

In response, forward-looking organizations are taking action to protect employees from the volume of collaborative demands by employing organizational network analysis (ONA).

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Harvard Business Review.