Even though employees spend 28% of their week managing emails...60.8% report that they ignore work emails.
As this article explains - it’s hard to improve employee satisfaction and workplace culture if the main way of contacting staff is through email — something that burdens people to the point they don’t want to check it.
The reality is that most leaders have NO IDEA how their communication is landing, and very few leaders are actually measuring who is reading, engaging with, and clicking through emails. Those that are doing this are what we’d refer to as “Early Adopters” and likely driving much higher levels of engagement.
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Microsoft’s Workplace Trends article unpacks how companies with highly engaged employees focus on two things:
As our clients have integrated Latch into the fabric of their cultures to unlock engagement through clearer communication and sustain that engagement by creating a feedback flywheel (or what we sometimes call a “listening system”) the process of going from not knowing to knowing (just how many people actually are ignoring email communication) has been sobering - but well worth it. |
🔓 This Week’s Latch Unlock: Ignorance is bliss...until it's not
After several launches and many weeks, one of our clients was experiencing that 30% of her employees were STILL in the “invite” stage on Latch.
Not only does this mean that they “ignored” the email to login, but more importantly 60+ people were not getting the critical weekly updates.
While there are many reasons why emails are going ignored…the bigger point is to acknowledge the power in knowing this information in the first place.
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” ← thanks Peter Drucker.
Up until now, most of us have been operating in the blissful state of ignorance without data on how our communication has been absorbed and experienced. We’ve mistakenly believed that our team is not only reading and soaking in our messages, but the messages are actually inspiring them to take action.
So instead of falsely assuming that her team wasn’t reading her emails because they didn’t care and/or weren’t really working, she instead:
- Reset expectations to what good looks like for digital communication - if only 30% of people admit to reading work emails - maybe that should be thought of as a baseline?
- Infiltrated the other digital spaces (like Slack and Monday.com) to point her employees to Latch which is helpful especially when creating new habits.
- Elevated the purpose and importance of the messages in Latch in one-on-ones, team meetings, and through the other leaders.
- Created FOMO moments by sharing special announcements that could ONLY be heard in Latch.
- Sent direct messages to those that weren’t engaged - which might sound over-the-top but turned out to be incredibly effective. And why not? Afterall, these employees are getting a paycheck 😀
And the result?
A 31% increase in the participation rate in the next launch.
Math-ing Engagement:
In today’s world it seems like getting people to simply read and respond to emails is making progress towards engagement. While this seems like we’ve significantly lowered our standards for what engagement is by a mile - it’s indicative of today’s struggles in hybrid/remote working models.
According to Gallup, disengaged employees contribute to losses ranging from 18% to 34% of the disengaged employee’s annual salary. So in this particular client’s case - in just one launch they avoided anywhere from $1M to $2.2M of losses.
That’s what we call a Latch Unlock.
Ready to learn more about how Latch can transform your organization? Let's chat.
