Towards a Considerate Email Culture

Version 1

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

We recommend reading the longer-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 mean thoughtful and careful with respect to the workload of others, and by ‘culture’, we mean collective 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 about who:

  • We should curate addressee lists carefully, only including those who absolutely must receive and/or respond to the information we are sending.
  • We should pay attention to automatic 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 be mindful 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 about what:

  • We should prioritise 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 as emojis, when appropriate.

Thinking about when:

  • 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 about where:

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

Thinking about why:

  • 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 about how:

  • New technological developments, such as using ChatGPT to co-author emails, might save senders time – but at 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 to Megan.Capon@admin.cam.ac.uk (who is happy to receive emails on this!).