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Radhika Panjwani
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Welcome to the weekly Careers newsletter from The Globe and Mail. To subscribe, click here.
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Radhika Panjwani is a freelance writer from Toronto.
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- Interruptions from e-mail increase stress
- Stress from overflowing inboxes can be managed when teams have clear e-mail policies and guidelines
- Emerging tools such as using artificial intelligence for e-mail management can improve performance and efficiency
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The more time employees spend responding to e-mails, the greater was their sense of being overwhelmed, a Canadian study found.
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But by combining artificial intelligence tools with strong policies at the team level, companies can alleviate the stress caused by the overflowing inbox, experts said.
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“If you’re constantly interrupted at work, this will affect the performance and productivity of your team as stress can spill over from individual level to team level,” said Shamel Addas, a professor of digital technology at the Smith School of Business at Queen’s University in Kingston and one of researchers of the study. “We found that introducing good [e-mail] practices tend to be most effective at the team level. Teams should set a best practices policy that includes among other things, when to send an e-mail versus opt for another collaboration tool [for example, slack or phone]; what constitutes as a congruent [suitable to main scope of work] e-mail? Who should you cc and more.”
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Additionally, managers must spell out a time-response window, based on urgency, and clear guidelines on deploying “reply all” e-mails. Organizations must also consider AI tools for e-mail management strategies, he said.
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The research team found when employees participated in several ongoing threads of e-mail or parallel communications simultaneously, these disjointed discussions caused significant subjective overload. Subjective overload refers to the extent to which a worker feels their work to be mentally and physically demanding, Prof. Addas said.
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The scholars studied 350 sales professionals’ e-mail habits for the research. The study found if the e-mails were congruent, for example, relevant to the employee’s main tasks such as client feedback or key information about a project, while it also increased stress, it spurred mindfulness as employees became more sensitive to context and perspective. They also became engaged and present.
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You’ve got mail and anxiety
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Georgetown University computer science professor and productivity writer Cal Newport writes in The New Yorker that the need to communicate constantly via e-mails has resulted in social distress as employees can now barely keep up with their inboxes.
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“As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, improvised messaging, we will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety,” Mr. Newport writes. “To return to our motivating question, there are many reasons why e-mail makes us miserable. It creates, for example, a tortuous cycle that increases the amount of work on our plate while simultaneously thwarting, through constant distraction, our ability to accomplish it effectively.”
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His suggestion’s to use e-mails and other tools with regular, brief status meetings and cut down on e-mail threads. Also, Mr. Newport says companies must move beyond assigning e-mail addresses to individuals, instead addresses be related to specific requests and managed and monitored by different employees.
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Promising new research shows AI-powered solutions can help automate the inbox and simplify day-to-day e-mail management, explained Prof. Addas. Here are some options:
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- E-mail prioritization: AI systems can learn from our e-mail activity, such as: which messages we open first, which ones we reply to and when. By analyzing our usage patterns, AI can categorize congruent and incongruent e-mails and sort them into low, medium and high priority folders so that important messages can be addressed promptly while lowering overall stress levels.
- Feedback buttons: Introduce “Like” or “thank you” buttons on incongruent e-mails to eliminate the generation of unnecessary e-mails. For example, a “Like” button is already available in new Outlook 365 deployments.
- Context Aware Systems: Use AI in e-mail clients to screen task-relevant content and sift and separate interruptions based on peoples’ availability or the task at hand, thus minimizing interruptions. The e-mail program can also be automated to manipulate the timing by silencing unproductive interruptions until a more opportune time.
- Summarize and extract key content: By leveraging natural language processing, AI can extract relevant topics from e-mails and highlight them. It can also be used to summarize long e-mails, extract action items or deadlines and create calendar events.
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“The integration of AI into e-mail management is not just an improvement; it’s a transformation of how we conduct work,” Prof. Addas said. “By automating routine tasks, prioritizing communication and reducing distractions, AI is setting the stage for a more focused and efficient workplace. I anticipate within the next few years, these AI-enhanced e-mail systems will become the new standard, transforming our approach to e-mail management and enabling professionals to reclaim valuable time for more strategic tasks.”
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- According to this CNBC story, the female work force in the U.S. is increasingly frustrated with less work-life balance and more work. Survey results show fewer women got raises and promotions.
- This blog in canadahires.com offers a comprehensive look at the remote working scene in Canada including trends and the most in-demand remote jobs.
- The scrouge of ageism strikes as mid-career Gen X workers get passed over for jobs, says this story on BBC.
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