Knowledge Bank

The Email Management Framework

Management has many issues to consider when considering how to get the most from email.  While their main concern will be to maximize organizational effectiveness, they will look to find the drivers that influence this most.  They will also recognize that organizational effectiveness is dependent on individual effectiveness, productivity and managing risk.

Our email management framework, EMF (Figure 1), consists of four quadrants, each covering one aspect of organizational practice that management should consider:

The bottom half of the matrix is concerned with the individual email user and considers efficiency and pressure.  The top half of the matrix addresses the organization: are we using email effectively?  Do we understand and manage the corporate risk of email use?  The left-hand side of the matrix is concerned with regulating pressure and risk, i.e., showing acceptable and appropriate levels of email pressure for the employee and risk for the organization.  The right-hand side of the matrix is concerned with efficiency and effectiveness, qualities that we wish to maximise (more efficiency is better than less). Finally, the four quadrants are interrelated; efficient use of email is a building block for achieving organizational effectiveness and efficient use of email will help reduce high levels of email pressure.  An email management program should therefore address all four quadrants and be aware of interactions and interdependencies between those quadrants.  Each of the quadrants covers an area of concern to management:

Individual email pressure - e.g.: anxiety caused by email volumes; perceived need to respond to emails quickly

Individual email efficiency - e.g.: time spent handling email; time recovering from email interruptions to work flow