For whom and under what circumstances does email message batching work?

Indy Wijngaards; Florie R Pronk; Martijn J Burger

doi:10.1016/j.invent.2022.100494

For whom and under what circumstances does email message batching work?

Internet Interv. 2022 Jan 7:27:100494. doi: 10.1016/j.invent.2022.100494. eCollection 2022 Mar.

Authors

Indy Wijngaards^{1

2}, Florie R Pronk¹, Martijn J Burger^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
² Erasmus School of Health & Policy Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
³ Department of Organization, Open University of the Netherlands, the Netherlands.

Abstract

Email plays an essential role in organizational communication but can also serve as pertinent source of work interruption and an impediment to well-being. Scholars have proposed email batching, processing emails only at certain times of the day, as a strategy to mitigate the negative consequences of email at work. As empirical evidence is mixed and applications in natural organizational contexts are lacking, we used survey data collected during a quasi-experimental top-down intervention in a Dutch financial services organization to investigate for whom and under what circumstances email batching is effective for reducing email interruptions and ameliorating well-being. We found that participants in the intervention group encountered less email interruptions than participants in the control group. Moreover, email batching reduced emotional exhaustion captured right after the intervention ended, especially for workers dealing with high email volumes and workers believing that instantaneous response was not expected in their organization. The effects of email batching wore off after two weeks and no significant effects on work engagement were found. We conclude that email batching should not be regarded as panacea for enhancing well-being and should only encouraged if it fits with workers' job tasks and organizational expectations regarding email response times more generally.

Keywords: Email batching; HCI; Interruptions; Organizational intervention; Well-being at work.