than work into home. As one civil servant emailed me: ‘I frequently get emails from colleagues sent at 2 or 3 a.m. And what’s more, copies of replies sent back around the same time. One man at a meeting recently admitted that he “snuck out of bed” in the middle of the night to do his emails, trying not to wake his partner, who “got annoyed about it”. He’ll be dead before he’s fifty.’
A manager for a software company emailed: ‘I enjoyed the rush in a way, but…I didn’t want to see friends or family in the evenings or weekends, it was just more hassle…I had a secretary organise my emails into four categories: urgent-important, not urgent but important, not important but urgent, etc., and I would only read and action the most pressing until I could face another long night at home sorting out all the others – only to find fifty new ones the next morning…The most apt metaphor to sum the experience up is to imagine yourself standing at the back end of a dumper truck full of gravel. It slowly tips out, covering you. You dig frantically to stop being buried but the gravel keeps on coming and never ceases. If you stop digging, you’ll die.’
But the frustration and resentment has not triggered any campaign or collective action to protect privacy. There have been no battles to institute ‘no calls outside office hours’ contracts, or protests against the home PC being linked up to the company intranet. On the contrary, this Trojan horse has frequently been welcomed; as one female executive explained, 24/7 accessibility is a price worth paying for greater freedom over when she works. The trade-off is privacy and boundaries in exchange for a degree of autonomy – you may work long, unpredictable hours, your leisure may never be free of the possibility of work intruding, but you have a measure of control and can take off a couple of quiet hours in the middle of the afternoon.
Technology has also transformed accessibility within organisations. That’s the appeal of email – private, quick and direct. The barriers of the bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation appear to crumble as we click on the ‘send’ box; there are no secretaries to brazen our way past, no underlings or deputies to deal with, we can reach anyone anywhere. Email has bred its own character and tone of democratic directness and informality. Of course, senior executives quickly discovered this led to overload, and put their secretaries in charge of their email, but its accessibility and privacy continues to be seductive, and reconfigures office relationships, subverting hierarchies and strengthening more egalitarian networks.
But email has some significant drawbacks. It has evolved as a means of communication very rapidly, with little etiquette or codes of conduct, and has major flaws: email correspondence is very hard to conclude satisfactorily, and because of its brevity and speed it is often very imprecise, thus leading to a much longer correspondence in order to clarify issues. One research study shows that ‘more than 65 per cent of all email messages fail to give the recipients enough information to act upon, and ambiguous and poorly-written emails can lead to misunderstandings that can cause tension within the workplace, and may lead to incorrect instructions being carried out’.15 Judy Bendis, an occupational psychologist, was called in to a major public sector organisation to help tackle the rising tide of emails. The biggest problem was that emails were distracting, she found: people were checking their email inbox two or three times an hour, which broke up their concentration; each check took at least two or three minutes, and then another minute to refocus attention. The whole process, repeated through the day, can take up 25 per cent of the employee’s time. One of the chief complaints of managers is constant interruptions, and email is one of the culprits.
But the biggest complaint of all is the sheer volume of emails. The higher you rise in an organisation, the bigger your electronic in-tray: an average of twenty-two emails a day at junior management level increases to forty-seven at the most senior, and the figure is growing all the time.16 Emails have a disproportionate impact on long and anti-social hours because they are typically dealt with either at the beginning or the end of the day. Asynchronous communication may have seemed initially like a form of liberation – you could find a moment in your own time to reply – but it is indeed often in your own time. Bendis found that: ‘For managers not at their desks for much of the day because they are in meetings, the only time to catch up is out of normal working hours. A lot of people were printing them out to read on the train or tube or picking them up at weekends.’ Those working part-time often have proportionally an even bigger email in-tray to deal with – catching up on the day or days they’ve been off. Taking a long holiday exacts a heavy price when emails pile up at the rate of fifty to a hundred a day, and many admit to checking up on them while they’re away, to prevent the build-up. Mary is a senior executive in an NHS trust:
I have an absolutely enormous electronic in-tray – usually about 250 to attend to. Of those about two hundred will include an attachment which requires my reading and commenting on it. I get about fifty emails a day, and 50 per cent of them I deal with immediately. Another 25 per cent I try and deal with at the end of the day and another 25 per cent get dealt with later. Usually I’ll be in at the weekend and have a clear-out. I had some time away recently and got back to find five hundred emails waiting. A lot of them have useful information, especially if you want to keep a breadth of knowledge of what’s going on in the organisation. In the past, managers of a particular expertise were left to deal with that but it’s all more interconnecting now.
The ‘carbon-copy’ function of email gets a big share of the blame for its volume. Senior managers are often being copied into emails just to cover the employee’s back, or in the hope of drawing attention to their work. Bendis found in her study that email was being used to seek ‘positive strokes’, particularly from a manager to an underling, the reply being the modern-day equivalent of a pat on the back,
But the carbon-copy email can also be vital. Mary explained how she has to keep abreast of a huge range of information, because she never knows at what point a particular development could impact on her responsibilities. A predecessor in her type of job twenty years ago would have kept his (it probably would have been a man) focus on his own department, she commented, but that thinking is now scorned as creating ‘silo’ organisations which can’t keep up with the speed of information flow and the pace of change. The sociologist Manuel Castells coined the phrase ‘the network society’ to describe the relationships which open up in the constantly changing and unpredictable digital society. The interconnectedness draws more and more activities into relationship with each other: the company whose stock price rises on rumours of a government initiative, the supplier whose contracts could then be hit, and so on. It’s the syndrome of the butterfly flapping its wings in the Bay of Bengal which causes storms elsewhere: small actions can have disproportionate consequences. The quality of the network is what determines the success or failure of the organisation or individual: you never know from what point will come information which may determine opportunity or disadvantage.
The network society has a very clear impact on hard work. The individual who has built up a network of useful relationships is at the nodal point of intersection where information is accurately analysed, decisions are made and power lies, but this is also where information overload is at its most acute. The more points of intersection the node bears, and thus the more flows of information, the more effective the decision-making and the potential for brilliant strategic breakthroughs – and, of course, the more work…much more work.
This makes the task of management much more complex – there are many more balls to keep juggling. And it makes the concept of professionalism, where definitions of commitment have always incorporated long hours and availability to the client, positively punishing. The interface with clients becomes more demanding; in the most skilled, lucrative parts of the labour market they want instant access throughout waking hours, while intensified competition accelerates the required turnaround times. The result is the kind of hours common in banking, corporate law, accountancy and consultancy, where seventy-hour weeks can be common and the timelessness of 24/7 global capitalism is unmediated by any reference to human well-being.
