#Leadership : Work Smart- The Smartest Ways to Use Email at Work…What Research Tells us about Taming your Inbox, When to Use All Caps, Whether to use Emoticons, how Quickly to Respond to Messages—and much More.
Email has become so ingrained in our workday life that we rarely give it a second thought. Perhaps we should.
Researchers have been putting a laser focus on how we can be smarter about using email at work, and they have come up with surprising insights—from the best way to tame an overflowing inbox to the unintended consequences of punctuation choices.
In some cases, these findings completely overturn what we think we know about how to write messages. For instance, responding to email right away can be a terrible idea. And using emojis can be a great one.
Here’s a roundup of what experts in the fields of psychology, management, linguistics and more have discovered.
Don’t answer too quickly—or after hours
Replying to email promptly is a good thing, right? Not always. In fact, in companies whose cultures emphasize speed of response, workers are more stressed, less productive, more reactive and less likely to think strategically.
Those are some of the conclusions reached by Emma Russell, senior lecturer in occupational psychology at Kingston University in the U.K., from a recent review of academic literature.
“People think that if they respond quickly to their colleague, that’s going to support a strong social relationship, but in terms of actual well-being and productivity, there was no evidence that that kind of culture is effective,” says Dr. Russell.
Inbox Impact
Some measures of the use of email in the workplace
Source: Compiled by Gloria Mark et al., “Email Duration, Batching and Self-interruption,” Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Handling email after hours is also detrimental. People who receive an email during off hours may feel more pressure to respond, Dr. Russell discovered, and those who do aren’t more efficient—they simply generate a higher volume of mail without actually getting more work done.
A company culture where employees are encouraged to answer emails quickly may be especially difficult for highly conscientious people. Her research on such workers showed that email notifications caused them higher stress than other people and made them unproductive in their other work, even though they often put off answering the notes.
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On the other hand, one size doesn’t fit all. Her preliminary findings from a new study of extroverts suggest that when they are working on routine tasks, being interrupted by an email notification might actually be good for them—the social stimulation may help them avoid boredom and complete their tasks more effectively.
Still, Dr. Russell has come to some overall conclusions. For most workers, a strategy of switching off email alerts but still checking email every 45 minutes or so and taking action on every message can help reduce stress and allow people to feel more in control. And she recommends using the “delay send” feature when replying to email during off hours, so that your inbox is cleared, but you aren’t putting pressure on anybody else to respond. (If other people follow that rule, of course, they aren’t putting pressure on you, either.)
What’s more, she says, companies should remove policies requiring or encouraging certain response times, and consider using shared email inboxes for teams, so that the load is shared among several people. And if workers need to focus on a particular task such as writing a report, they could be encouraged to have their email automatically forwarded to a colleague to allow them to work uninterrupted.
The best times to send an email
How do you get people to pay attention to your emails amid all the competing demands on their attention? Kristina Lerman, project leader at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, has done extensive research on cognitive overload—how our brains respond when faced with too much information.
One key finding: When faced with a screen packed with information, people tend to focus on what’s at the top. So, it follows that you want to time your email to correspond with when people are checking.
In a 2015 study in collaboration with Yahoo Labs, Dr. Lerman and her colleague Farshad Kooti analyzed a huge data set of 16 billion emails—personal and business—to look for patterns. They found that people replied more quickly early in the week, and those replies were also longer. The same applied to time of day—between 8 a.m. and noon was best. “I use these findings myself,” says Dr. Lerman. “If I want to send an important email, I don’t do it on a Friday. I wait until Monday morning, so it’s much more likely to be at the top.”
The trick to negotiating by email
Email is what academics call a “lean medium.” In face-to-face communication, we use a huge range of nonverbal cues to help convey what we mean. On the phone, we still have tone of voice. With email, we have none of that.
So, that should make email bad for complex tasks like negotiation, right?
Not necessarily, says Jennifer Parlamis, associate professor of organization development at the University of San Francisco’s School of Management.
In one study, she asked participants to engage in simulated business negotiations over email. The successful pairs of negotiators tended to take advantage of the strengths of email, such as the ability to rehearse what to say and convey a lot of information in a clear, specific form that people can refer back to later on. They were also better at dealing with its limitations, such as the potential for misunderstandings, missed emails and time-zone mix-ups.
“Some research says that because email is missing all of this nonverbal richness, it’s not a good tool for communication,” Dr. Parlamis says. “But our research points to the fact that if you understand how to use email effectively, it can be very helpful for your negotiations.”
Don’t worry about some all caps
It’s one of the longest-standing pieces of conventional wisdom about email, dating back to the days of dial-up modems: Don’t exaggerate LIKE THIS! All caps means you’re shouting. And other kinds of loose spelling just look goofy.
But new research suggests it isn’t always right.
“What I find is that good leaders often use a wide array of techniques and strategies when writing to their teams,” says Erika Darics, a lecturer in applied linguistics at Aston University in the U.K. When used judiciously, she says, a word or two in capital letters can provide emphasis, communicate urgency or inject humor. Adding a capitalized “AND” or “BUT” can also act as a cue that the writer is going to add more.
So although typing a whole email in capitals is a no-no, there’s nothing wrong with using all caps in smaller doses.
Context matters, of course, and there are formal situations in which these techniques would be inappropriate. But the broad lesson is that within teams, a little playfulness and stylistic fluidity can go a long way.
That lesson goes beyond all caps. For example, Dr. Darics recently analyzed a conversation in which the boss joked about her subordinate working late and wrote, “Go hoooome, E.T.” The elongation of the word “home” and the reference to the movie “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” made it clear that this was a joke (to which the employee responded with a “LOL”). A more traditional sentence like “Go home,” on the other hand, could have seemed abrupt or even been interpreted as a command.
Use emoticons (with people you know)
Another way to get across emotion is with emoticons—small pictures of faces—or their cousins, emojis, which depict tiny objects.
GROUP
For instance, the researchers showed people a deliberately ambiguous message, “Got a ticket,” which could refer to a movie ticket, a speeding ticket or a range of other things. Adding a “plane” emoji helped people to understand the message better, and they also viewed that version of the message as being more positive in tone.
One caveat, though: Other studies have found that in business communication, emoticons and emojis can be useful mostly for internal communication within teams. When you’re using emoticons with strangers, on the other hand, they can have unintended consequences.
Ella Glikson, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business, conducted an experiment with fellow researchers Arik Cheshin of the University of Haifa in Israel and Gerben van Kleef of the University of Amsterdam to examine the effect of using a smiley face on first impressions in a business context.
They conducted three experiments in which they showed the participants various business emails, some written in plain text and others with emoticons added. They discovered that people viewed the writers who used smileys as less competent, and were less likely to share information with them.
The unintentional little stuff counts.
It’s not only all caps and emoticons that can be misinterpreted. In her analysis of business emails, Dr. Darics has found that people assign meaning to even smaller details.
For example, in one email exchange, the writer accidentally included a double question mark at the end of a question. It conveyed an impression of rudeness or aggression, and the recipient was offended.
Similarly, if you always sign your emails “Best” but suddenly switch to the more formal “Best regards,” your colleagues might think you’re trying to distance yourself from them, even if that wasn’t your intent. People even read significance into time stamps. Replying within seconds might make you seem efficient—or perhaps too eager, depending on the context.
“In digital writing, you don’t see the other person, so you can’t gauge anything from their facial expressions or gestures or tone of voice,” Dr. Darics explains. “Because these things are so important, when we read an email, we instinctively assign meaning to anything that we can possibly assign meaning to.”
Even the humble period can be significant. Research by Celia Klin, psychology professor at New York’s Binghamton University, showed that single-word text messages came across as less sincere and more abrupt when the period was included. “My hunch is that it’s because we are really limited when we are sending each other text messages,” says Dr. Klin. “So we use what we do have available on the keyboard. Punctuation can be used grammatically, but also rhetorically.”
So it’s important to pay attention to the smallest things, Dr. Darics says. Try removing components, rereading the message and seeing if the meaning changes. “I always say our main aim shouldn’t be to become better communicators,” she says. “It should be to become better analysts.”
If all of that sounds like too much work to put into composing an email, consider a series of experiments by Dr. Riordan, which show that people are consistently overconfident in their ability both to understand emotion in email and to convey it. The lesson from her research, she says, is that instead of skimming emails and firing off quick responses, you should take extra time to view those exchanges from the other person’s perspective.
Dr. Darics adds that good email communication is not about our intentions, but about the meaning that other people assign to what we write. “Whatever your intentions are, the way people read your email might be different,” she says. “Good communicators will challenge themselves and ask, ‘This is what I meant, but is this what the other person will get?’ ”
Email Mr. Blackman at reports@wsj.com.
WSJ.com | Andrew Blackman |
