Managing Sticky Situations at Work

Chapter 11Sticky E-situationsIf you are anything like me, you are spending more and more hours inthe workday at your computer. Perhaps, you are out and about butsending and receiving messages via your handheld device. Communicationin today’s work world goes beyond the face-to-face interactionsor even the telephone contacts of the past. We zip off more and moree-mails and texts than ever before. David Shipley and Will Schwalbe intheir book Send tell us that the Bush administration was expected toturn over 100 million e-mails to the National Archives in contrast to33 million from the Clinton administration in 2001. 1 Most of usdon’t need statistics to tell us how much we depend on e-mail to conductour daily businesses. In fact, a large telecommunications companyinitiated a weekly ‘‘no e-mail’’ day similar to the ‘‘casual’’Fridays. At first the staff balked, but after the first day, they enjoyednot having to deal with e-mail. In a poignant example, one staffmember contacted another by telephone. During their conversationthey realized that they worked in the same facility and after a bit longertime, they realized that they sat a few cubicles away from one another.These realizations demonstrate for us that we have become overly relianton e-mail and other electronic communication.