A glaring omission

Consider: there are many potentially harmful activities that require a special license or permit.

For example:

• Incompetent driving can harm people, so you need a license to drive.
• Incompetent medical practice can harm people, so you need a license to practice it.
• Incompetent lawyers can harm their clients, so you need a license to practice law.

And so on. Heck, even James Bond had a license to kill, implying that other secret agents did not.

SO:

• Writing email can harm people, so you need…

No, you don’t. In fact, anyone can send email in an organization, no matter the danger.

And danger there is, make no mistake. I’ve written extensively about the harm that email misuse, abuse and overuse can cause; see here for some detailed insights. The bottom line is that information overload, of which email overload remains a major component, can adversely impact productivity, quality of work, decision accuracy, creativity, stress and quality of life big time. The cost to employers, employees, and employees’ families – in short, most everyone – runs well beyond money, though money is also involved to the tune of trillions of dollars worldwide.

So how come you don’t need a license to send email, given the severe harm it can do?

The missing education course

More to the point: how come you don’t need to take training before even being allowed near the Reply All button? All those skills requiring a license – driving, medical practice, practicing law – involve study before you can even apply for a permit: there is driver’s education, medical school, law school… but email doesn’t have so much as a short course.

This is a big problem. There is every reason for organizations to mandate “Email Ed” classes for all employees, like it does for safety training and other critical skills. Teaching employees how to use email inside an organization will not only curb the most harmful behaviors towards other employees (for example, it may teach “Only copy on a message the people with a real need to act – as TO recipients –  or to know – as CC”); it will also make the trainees more productive and less stressed at their work (by teaching them how to process their incoming mail faster). Furthermore, it will impart to employees the cultural norms that should govern communication culture in the specific organization (e.g. “In this company we expect employees not to  send each other non-urgent messages after work hours”). Most importantly, it will have everybody on the same page (you can see that the examples quoted above would not work if only some people knew those mandates).

What you can do about this

In the unlikely case that your workplace has a company-wide mandatory email training program, you’re in luck – you can enjoy doing productive work, faster, and see more of your children. I’ve seen a few instances of this, but they are rare.

If your workplace does not have such training in place, this is your opportunity to win a place in paradise: take action, be a change agent, and drive the organization to bring the missing training up. You can team up with the training, or IT, or HR group to get it done.

One thing you should remember is to add this training as a prerequisite in the “new employee orientation” classes that are part of the company’s existing onboarding process; otherwise your impact will die out as people leave the company over time. New hires are at exactly the right point to impress them with email behavior skills and requirements.

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