Nudging Employees to Reduce Email Usage: Paper Summary
Dutch healthcare workers were able to reduce their email usage through three nudges. But do nudges limit freedom of choice?
Email overuse can wreak havoc on our working lives. But nudges can help – and they don’t need to limit freedoms.
We can’t live with it and we can’t live without it – that’s right, we’re talking about email.
While email is a cornerstone of modern professional life, its negative side effects are well-documented. Email usage has been empirically associated with lower work quality, increased burnout, and decreased work satisfaction. As so eloquently put by tech guru Cal Newport, “Humans are not network routers. Just because it’s possible for us to send and receive messages incessantly through our waking hours doesn’t mean that it is a sustainable way to exist.”1
Plenty of firms have piloted strategies to reduce email overload, most commonly by restricting email usage.2 While these techniques see improvement, are there non-intrusive ways to help us break our email chains?
Nudges are small, subtle hints designed to get people to act a certain way. Plenty of our decisions are guided by subtle nudges, from what appetizer to get at a restaurant to which energy plan to choose for our homes.
But there are still two big complaints about nudges: do they take away our freedom, and do they really work?
Sources
- Newport, C. (2021). Email is making us miserable. The New Yorker, Condé Nast. Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/e-mail-is-making-us-miserable
- Perlow, L. A. & Porter, J. (2009). Making time off predictable - and required. Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Publishing. Retrieved from: https://hbr.org/2009/10/making-time-off-predictable-and-required
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