The Horrors of Work Email Ghosting

How Prioritizing Email Communication Can Improve Your Organization’s Work Culture

As someone who conducts workplace culture assessments, non-response to emails at work has emerged as an issue in every single assessment I’ve conducted.

The scenarios are all over the map:

Administrators won’t respond to a staff member’s email, stalling her work. When her supervisor gets involved by sending an email to the same people and gets an immediate response, the staff member feels frustrated. She feels like she doesn’t matter and is not important enough to receive a response.

A person being harassed at work takes the proper steps and emails HR but doesn’t get a response for weeks while the harassment escalates. She is left to manage her intensifying fears and anxieties without any workplace support.

New staff members try to access critical information during a pandemic, but their emails go unanswered. They are left feeling even more isolated and unsupported during an already stressful time.

Stories such as this aren’t isolated issues. They are typically indicative of larger-scale communication breakdowns and are paired with other risks in the work environment.

To support an organization in creating organizational change and shifting towards a safer and healthier culture, I advise leadership that one of the simplest changes they can make is improving email responsiveness. Yet, organizational leaders typically balk at the idea.

“It’s not a good use of my time.”

“That would never work.”

“I wish!”

The problem with this resistance is that responding to emails is not simply a matter of etiquette. Responsiveness is also a matter of respect and cultivating a healthy work environment.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we all start responding within 5 minutes to every email that comes our way, nor am I proposing that we’re obligated to respond to sales emails or other cold emails. I’m a big believer in boundaries! I don’t check my work email or Slack messages after hours or on weekends. If I’m in a meeting or delivering a training, I’m not simultaneously responding to emails. And when I am in a space of reflection, research, and creative thinking at work, I may take an extra working day to respond to an email. I support the implementation of a shorter work week so that we all can have more time for ourselves and our loved ones while making a living.

I also work in an organization whose foundations are in crisis response services. A sense of urgency is critical for trauma-informed responses to crises and emergencies. This core aspect of our work culture has guided our approach to holding expectations for email responsiveness.

Defining Email Expectations

At my organization, we are expected to respond to emails within two working days, unless we’re off of work. This applies to everyone working at all levels of the organization in response to colleagues, clients, community partners, you name it. We may not always do it perfectly, but it has helped create a culture of responsiveness and care.

Meanwhile, I’m repeatedly faced with non-response to emails I send to people in other systems. I also have a chronic illness and intimately know what it’s like to have calls go unreturned and information withheld by the medical system I’m dependent on.

Given all of this, why is there such resistance to setting workplace expectations for email responsiveness? Based on conversations with people from various industries, I’ve learned that people feel their workload is too overwhelming and/or that responding to others’ emails is not a high priority. And while I certainly understand the heavy workloads and the feeling of being overwhelmed, I believe the core issue is rooted in priorities. Leadership, workplace systems, and culture all set the pace for how staff prioritizes their tasks. And if communication is not a key focus amongst leadership, it will not be prioritized by staff.

In a New York Times Op-Ed, researcher Adam Grant writes, “‘[m]y inbox is other people’s priorities’ bothers me as a social scientist, but also as a human being. Your priorities should include other people and their priorities. It’s common courtesy to engage with people who are thoughtful in reaching out.”

I would argue that a lot of the time, the issue is less how busy we are and more about priorities, which are set by leadership, workplace systems, and culture. I’ve consistently had a heavy workload, but when I switched to a zero-inbox model, I became much more responsive to emails simply because they weren’t being pushed so far down in my inbox that I forgot about them. So rather than thinking we are “too busy to respond,” we could consider better systems of email management to improve communication and response times.

Below are some critical questions to help leaders think through potential changes to internal communication strategies:

• Where are the communication bottlenecks in the workplace?
• What other communication tools could we use besides email that could improve access to information?
• What are the workplace expectations for responding to emails?
• Who are employees expected to be responsive to? Are expectations equally applied, or are they dependent on power and position?

A safe and healthy workplace seeks to minimize power imbalances and fosters a culture of accountability, trust and belonging. Setting and maintaining consistent expectations for responsiveness in internal communications is one way of addressing these two key issues and can go a long way toward improving the work environment.

Human-Centric Communication

Sometimes an email contains a problem we can’t solve at that moment. Yet the immediate need is not that the problem be solved, but that the human being identifying the problem be acknowledged and assured that the problem is seen and will be addressed in some way.

“Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I don’t have time right now to take action on it, but I’ve added it to my list and will follow up with you soon.”

“Thanks for your email. I’m not the best person to respond to your question, but I’ve looped in so-and-so to see if they have the answer.”

This seemingly small acknowledgment of the person behind the email actually represents a powerful shift toward a more human-centered, trauma-informed work culture.

If responding to work emails is not a priority, it’s at best stalling work and adding more to others’ workloads. At worst, it leads to failure to respond to critical needs of people in your workplace and teaches employees that their concerns don’t matter. This might be normal, but it is not okay.

Simply accepting email non-response as the norm in workplace creates organizational risk by:

• reinforcing ideas of who is and is not valued in the organization due to their position and importance, and
• tolerating ineffective systems where important things fall through the cracks and employee and client needs are neglected.

Healthy and effective communication is essential to getting work done and to cultivating a workplace culture of safety and respect. If staff truly don’t have the capacity to respond to work emails in a reasonable amount of time, their workload is too high. I encourage leaders to quit modeling and tolerating email ghosting and consider systemic changes that can support a shift toward a more respectful and responsive work environment. It’s a small change that can have a big impact.