Towards a Considerate Email Culture

Version 1

Dr Ella McPherson (Deputy Head, Director of Education) andMegan Capon (Education Projects Coordinator), Cambridge School of the Humanities and Social Sciences

We recommend reading thelonger-form version of this guidance, which underpins these ideas with academic literature and further explains their rationales. 

What is a considerate email culture?

By ‘considerate’, we meanthoughtful and careful with respect to the workload of others, and by ‘culture’, we meancollective values and practices around email-work.  The overall aim of this considerate email culture is a manageable level of email workload that facilitates working together while also supporting staff and student well-being (Russell, Jackson, Fullman & Chamakiotis 2023). 

At the core of a considerate email culture is a focus on protecting the inboxes of others, displacing or supplementing individualistic mainstream approaches that aim for one’s own ‘inbox zero’ (Landry & Lewiss 2021). 

What are considerate email practices?

Thinking aboutwho:

• We shouldcurate addressee lists carefully, only including those who absolutely must receive and/or respond to the information we are sending.
• We should pay attention toautomatic replies, thinking twice before sending messages to colleagues who are on annual leave or non-workdays and using automatic replies to communicate our own email boundaries.
• We should bemindful that staff of particular identities(i.e. female staff) and in particular roles (including DUGEs and student administrators) receive a disproportionate amount of emails.

Thinking aboutwhat:

• We shouldprioritise specificity to make our emails as legible as possible, like defining purposes and timeframes in subject lines.
• We should take advantage of email features that clarify and quickly communicate our meanings, such asemojis,when appropriate.

Thinking aboutwhen:

• Following on from the‘right to disconnect’, workplace policies and our own practices should limit emailing out of work hours (Secunda 2019).
• We should adopt ‘no email Friday afternoon’ policies, to give colleagues a chance to wrap up their week’s work and have a predictable chunk of time to dedicate to projects (Bennett 2023).

Thinking aboutwhere:

• We should think aboutwhere else this communication might effectively happen – could it be saved for a meeting (Twumasi, Cooper & Siegl 2019)?

Thinking aboutwhy:

• As email is ‘work about the work’, lots of email traffic might be a symptom, not a cause, of a work problem (Zukas & Malcolm 2017). We should stop to consider why we are sending or receiving a high volume of email in a particular work area.

Thinking abouthow:

• New technological developments, such as using ChatGPT to co-author emails, might save senders time – butat the expense of recipients, who must decipher a larger volume of less sensical emails. 

This considerate email culture guidance is a working document.  We welcome feedback on the guidance as well as on your experience consulting on and implementing a considerate email culture locally and experiencing its effects on workload.  Please send your thoughts toMegan.Capon@admin.cam.ac.uk (who is happy to receive emails on this!).