An overflowing inbox is driving employees to quit

Staying in touch with your workforce has become a critical part to making remote work run smoothly. But there’s a fine line between helpful and harmful outreach.

Twenty-two percent of employees want to leave their current job because of the volume of email they receive, according to a productivity survey conducted by Superhuman, an email platform. A third of employees say that too many video calls makes them want to quit.

Managers feel the need to overcompensate for the lack of in-person connectivity — firing off endless messages and responding without delay. But those work communications are a major source of distraction and stress for their teams: 44% of employees dream of a work day without video calls, nearly a third want a break from email and the remaining 25% crave a notification-free day.

“There's such a low barrier to entry to send someone a Slack message,” says Kristen Hayward, head of people at Superhuman. “Depending on how one manages through Slack, it can actually be a really disruptive tool and there can be this need to respond very quickly, which can be very anxiety inducing.”

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To avoid the onslaught of online messaging, nearly two in three remote workers would rather commute again if they could be unburdened from escalating emails and notifications, the survey found. More than three in five remote workers say they’re more likely to reply immediately to an email from their boss or team than to a text or DM from friends or family.

The pressure is disproportionately affecting female workers. Sixty-four percent of women say they have to deal with a notification in 5 minutes or less — significantly more than the 56% of men who say the same, the survey found. While 30% of women respond to a notification within a minute, fewer than a quarter of men do so.

The discrepancy is due to 7 out of 10 women believing the pandemic will slow their career progression — they may feel the need to respond quickly in order to prove commitment.

“There's just a huge need to take a step back and really think, ‘How do we get outside of this constant need for communication?’ and instead get more lasting communication practices in place,” Hayward says.

To achieve healthier means of communication and prevent employee burnout, managers are encouraged to rethink their expectations when it comes to engagement, Hayward says.

Instead of defaulting to a direct message, an email could be more efficient; allowing employees to attend certain meetings off-camera could ease some of the stress; adding taglines to emails to let the recipient know whether the email is urgent or not could eliminate the disruption and finally, adjusting the outlook on non-emergent response times to two business days to fit within workers’ boundaries.

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“What I'm hopeful we'll see is companies will continue to lean on the intrinsic motivators and marry that with a better work-life management world for employees,” Hayward says. “Then they can achieve a really happy, productive every day and long-term happiness as well.”