Is Email Harming Your UBT?

Mandy Sly, a unit-based team consultant in Kern County (Southern California), was facilitating the launch of a unit-based team. The group suffered from low morale—a problem compounded by their habit of taking up difficult issues over email and liberal use of the “reply all” button.

“There was a lot of miscommunication,” says Sly, who is now a UBT coordinator in Southern California assigned to the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions. “Email is there to improve communication, but if it is not used properly, it can do a lot of damage to individuals, teams and organizations.”

Why does it matter?

Communicating by email is the norm for managers and many other workers at Kaiser Permanente—a great innovation, but fraught with potential pitfalls. And with the advent of unit-based teams, managers are likely to be carrying on email conversations with more people at more levels of the organization: labor co-leads, sponsors, facilitators and employees. That means email etiquette is more important than ever if the open, respectful communication that is part of the foundation of the Labor Management Partnership is going to help improve performance.

What’s the problem?

Stripped of tone of voice, body language and facial expression, email communication means those receiving the message don’t have some key (unwritten) information on which to base their interpretation of the content. In fact, people only correctly ascertain the intended tone of an email only half the time, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2006. Worse, they have no clue they are getting it wrong. They think they’ve correctly interpreted tone 90 percent of the time.

“Email is not very good at conveying tone and nuance,” writes Alan Murray in The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management, to be published in October 2010. “That seems to be doubly true when the sender is a manager and the receiver is a subordinate. Suggestions made in jest can too easily be mistaken for serious commands; observations made with irony can too often be received as literal.”