Workers of the world, untie yourselves from email

Here is the short version of Britain’s “productivity puzzle”. An average French worker takes four days to get through the same amount of work a Briton does in five. A doff of the chapeau to them. All that fornication and camembert apparently makes no difference. But, with the thinking cap back on, one might also wonder how it is – what with Britain’s preponderance of “hard-working families” – the country puts up such a poor show on tables that chart international worker efficiency. Only Japan limps behind the UK in the G7’s productivity league (the same Japan whose 1990-2010 economic slump is cheerfully known as the “lost two decades”).

The typical economists’ explanation for this is dreary. A lack of investment in infrastructure, a shortage of skills in engineering and construction. But one possible solution strikes closer to home. According to Professor Sir Cary Cooper, a former government advisor, too much emailing has sapped the life out of Britain’s workforce. Employees spend so much time refreshing their inbox outside of the office, says Cooper, they fail to refresh themselves. Ping! That’s the sound of “electronic overload”.

I quite agree. You can go anywhere in the world and if you’re still peeking at your email, you might as well be back where you marinate for 40 hours of the week. Check in the park and the trees morph into coat-racks, the sun turns into an overhead strip light. By the beach, and the sound of surf becomes the whirr of an air-conditioning unit. Of course it helps to have the complaint phrased in terms of “lower ouput per head”, as Cary attempts to put it. Employers can lump that sort of phrase into a pie-chart, send it by the accountants and adjust company policy, for the good of the bottom-line, not the mere sanity of their employees.

The McKinsey Global Institute worked out that emails take up 28 per cent of a standard working day. They do not attempt to figure out what percentage of those emails are an utter waste of time, but I wouldn’t flinch if it edged towards half. Professor Cary’s certainly right to suggest a ban, or at least a significant tapering off, on in-house email. Walking and talking is clearer, and better for the spine-soul nexus, as they say in the business world.