Effect of e-mail at work

Email (e-mail) has become an indispensable part of the information structure in an organization. It is considered an effective means of communication, but if exploited improperly, it can reduce employee productivity.

Reading and responding to e-mails of course causes people to interrupt the flow of thought or other work, leading to a lack of focus on work that reduces productivity. Some employees argue that they can both work with e-mails and perform other tasks. But actually, according to Kathleen Nadeau, a psychologist who advises a business, specializes in the study of time management and disorders of lack of concentration, 'our brain is incapable of doing so. two tasks at the same time . ' She said that interrupting a job frequently to do another job quickly caused our cognitive process to be depleted.

However, saying this does not mean denying the positive impact of e-mail. Some other psychologists believe that interruptions due to e-mail may to some extent increase creativity and human work capacity.

Adam Cox, a psychologist has spent many years researching the effects of performing multiple tasks at the same time and interruptions, explaining that when we receive work-related e-mails, they often stimulates the prefrontal cortex (prefrontal cortex) to make us better solve problems. This cortical part is a region specialized in creating and forming ideas and languages, as well as regulating people's love, hate and anger.

But everything has its limits. Cox noted: ' We don't know how much reading and responding to e-mails is, but it's obvious that to a certain extent, it no longer increases the likelihood of working .'

Thus, the problem is whether there is a need to limit the number of times to check e-mail in a day. Most experts agree that this depends on the work and industry of each person, and they should set their own rules.

Christi Youd, president of consulting firm Organize Enterprise and the author of Organize Your Office for Success, proposed to carry out this test twice a day at ten o'clock in the morning and one or two o'clock in the afternoon, because we will have an hour or two of work after that.

In contrast, career consultant, Debra Condren, thinks that setting a specific time to check e-mail can create more stress, especially when you haven't seen an important message boss or customer.

Thomas Jackson, Loughborough University professor in Leicestershire, England, joined two colleagues, Ray Dawson and Darren Wilson, to conduct a study to assess the impact of interruptions caused by e-mail at Workplace. The study was conducted at Danwood Group, a company that supplies office equipment, with more than 500 employees working in 19 branches of the company across the UK.

The results show that most employees use the new mail check program every five minutes, and take between six seconds and two minutes to answer a letter. Time for them to return to the same level of work before being interrupted by e-mail was 64 seconds. Although these times may not be much, with a growing number of e-mails received every day, its progressive influence is no longer small.

Since then, Jackson has proposed a number of methods to help employees reduce the impact of work interruptions caused by e-mail. For example, extend the new mail check time to 45 minutes instead of five minutes, so they will have more time to do their real work.

One of the big problems now is that the number of e-mails received in a day for some people can be quite large, including a lot of spam. So what should people do before opening the letter? Experts say people can spend up to two minutes looking through e-mails they want to answer, and often delete other unnecessary e-mail immediately, especially spam.

According to Eric Abrahamson, a professor at Columbia Business School in New York, you can use the preview function to display the first few lines of content, thereby deciding which messages can be deleted immediately, which messages need to be paid. word…

Ms. Youd said Microsoft Outlook and some other e-mail management programs have the function of marking the priority of messages with different colored flag icons - red is the highest priority. This function allows you to categorize messages that need to be answered but cannot be answered immediately.

In the era of information explosion like today, good management of modern communication facilities such as e-mail and chat is essential. These modern tools help us exchange information more quickly but also have negative impacts on labor productivity. The main problem is how we use them to maximize their performance.

Dang Thieu