Perhaps no workplace technology is so widely adopted, so widely used, and yet so widely reviled as email. Because of its ubiquity, most people don’t think much about how they use it, so we sought to identify how email is related to performance and other outcomes in organizations.
Despite a widespread perception that email is a drain on employee time and productivity, we found that its effect on performance actually depends on the email content, the performance time frame, and how email is managed. If the email content is congruent — or relevant — to an employee’s primary work tasks, email interruptions can have a positive effect on employee performance. Congruent emails are associated with mindfulness, although they also come at the cost of higher subjective workload on a daily basis. Incongruent emails, relating to secondary work activities or unrelated to work, are where the real problems arise. Developing more effective shared practices for handling email in light of this can help maximize the performance benefits — and minimize the performance liability — of email.