Email at your peril!

The email trail

This week I have been emailing several people to chase up responses to messages sent out in August. I was pleased to receive one automatic message: ‘I won’t be responding to emails this week as I am on holiday with my lovely family’. A great reply. (It is half-term for some teachers.) Another automated response reads: ‘I am on the half-term break but will reply as soon as I can’. Oh dear – a shame. And there was, ‘I am on my summer break and won’t manage to reply for some time’. Ho hum!

I gather it is Ray Tomlinson, a New York computer programmer in the 1970s, we have to blame for electronic communication. As Simon Kelner (The i Newspaper 23/10/19), reminds us: ‘The advent of email changed the rules of engagement for everyone and no-where has this been more consequential than in the workplace‘.

Avoid emails after 9.00 pm

When I was a Head, I tried not to email anyone after 9.00 pm – and certainly endeavoured to avoid the ‘ping’ of the email after that evening hour. Early on in my senior managing career I realised that to open a parental ‘wine o’clock’ email after I was home was likely to rob me of sleep: there was nothing I could do about the inevitable ‘complaint’ until the morning. (Besides, my wife quite rightly castigated me for checking my ‘phone after this hour and banned the device from the bedroom: very wise indeed.)

In the latter years of my Headship, I was impressed by hearing of one school which banned work emails after 6.00 pm and had a setting on the school system to ensure this was enforced. Moreover, I gather that in France it is actually illegal for companies with more than 50 employees to send emails after recognised working hours – and companies such as Lidyl and Volkswagen use software to intercept such ‘Exocet missiles’ aimed at workers during their leisure moments.

Recent research

This is all very well, but now I have heard of a body of research (from Sussex University) which suggests that prohibiting employees from checking their emails outside of normal working hours can actually harm their mental health! It seems that some people just must be ‘connected’ and feel in control of their communication channels.

Clearly, like so much in life, a balance needs to be achieved: strict policies in this area can, it appears, cause additional stress to some people. The younger worker today generally feels it’s natural to receive work emails outside of normal employment hours (and for teachers I defy anyone to classify ‘normal’ in term time). Ray Tomlinson has, in Keller’s words, ‘let the genie out of the bottle‘ and we cannot put it back no matter how hard we try. ‘The only guidance I give to work colleagues‘, Keller concludes, ‘is not to send a work email at a time you wouldn’t consider making a ‘phone call to deliver the same message‘. Wisdom indeed.

FYI -ELI5 is not a postcode

Acronyms are everywhere!

I am currently in Liverpool visiting family. The other day I had my four-year-old grandson in the car on our way to football club. We passed street signs telling us that ‘dream’ should now be ‘believe’ and ‘stadium’ was now to be called ‘home’ when my grandson suddenly exclaimed, “Look Bubba (his name for his granddad), we are now in L5”. What on earth has happened to our language? I think I am in need of ELI5…’Explain it Like I’m Five’.

AMA…Ask Me Anything

I am in the City of the so-called ‘friendly derby’ (apparently the Blues and the Reds in this City of Belief and Home really like each other except when playing footy) and I am here to help out in a family which has a new baby and so I am AMA…’Ask Me Anything’ (which translates further as ‘I’m ready, waiting and willing’).

I am all for KISS (‘keep it simple, stupid’), not least in the home of a new born and when the headlines this week about baby research are all about DNA: did you know this stands for ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’? Clearly another case for ELI5. Still, now I am retired I am no longer afflicted by YAM. (In my younger days in Africa this was the name for sweet potato but apparently now means ‘Yet Another Meeting’.)

Things move fast, however, and my children now tell me that I should take care when putting LOL at the end of a text or WhatsApp message. I thought it meant ‘Laugh Out Loud’ (or ‘lots of love’) but apparently this has long since been replaced by LUZL which is a corruption of LOLs and denotes fun, excitement, kicks and laughs (and not always of the straight forward kind).

TIL…Today I Learned

My head is already reeling and so I’ll conclude by telling you this: TIL (‘Today I Learned’) that the most useful acronym of our time is ‘TL;DR’. I wish I’d known this when dealing with 80+ emails a day as a HM / HT (Headmaster/Head Teacher), not to mention the YAMs. I expect that President Trump uses ‘TL;DR’ rather a lot. Worked it out yet? It stands for ‘Too Long; Didn’t Read’.

JSYK (‘Just So You Know’) I am indebted to Gyles Brandreth in a recent edition of the I newspaper for his stimulus here. OAO (‘Over And Out’).

Stress busting

Teacher stress

We have just had ‘stress in the workplace day’ and the educational Press has again been full of statistics about the impact of increasing workloads on teachers and other professionals. A YouGov survey in 2017 found that 75% of teachers in the UK reported symptoms of stress (including anxiety, depressions and panic attacks) compared with just 62% of the population as a whole.

Research

The Times Educational Supplement last November brought matters into sharp focus as follows:

Teaching is among the most stressful jobs you can do in Britain, according to new health and safety statistics. The latest figures from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) show that in the teaching profession there were 2,460 cases of work-related stress per 100,000 workers.

This was twice the average rate across all industries of 1,230 cases per 100,000 workers in the three-year period averaged over 2014-15 to 2016-17.

“Stress is more prevalent in public service industries, such as education, human health and social care work activities and public administration and defence,” the report states.

It added that previous surveys had found the predominant cause of stress was workload – in particular, tight deadlines. Other causes were too much pressure or responsibility, a lack of managerial support, organisational changes, violence and role uncertainty.

“Work-related stress, depression or anxiety continues to represent a significant ill health condition in the workforce of Great Britain,” the report concludes.

A recent DfE report on teachers’ decisions to leave teaching found workload was the single most common reason – cited by 75 per cent of ex-teachers as the reason they quit the profession. Changes in policy were the second biggest cause.

I have to say that in my 38 years of teaching, I have indeed come across several colleagues who have had time off for stress or who have ‘battled on’ despite being under tremendous pressure. I believe that these instances are increasing and thus they align with this research. A few years ago I went through a particularly stressful period as a Head – brought on, I feel, by a combination of ‘issues’ to do with school parents and their high expectations (unrealistic in some cases) together with a number of tricky staffing concerns. This experience led me to consider, along with some medical intervention, stress-busting / minimising approaches.

Tips

I hasten to add that a degree of stress is, of course, healthy and like most things in life we are looking to reach a balance. My response to my own anxiety was not revolutionary but, I believe, helped me manage the inevitable pressures that came with my job and also with teaching in general. I stopped checking work emails after 9.00 pm, for example, and, indeed, avoided the computer for any reason after this time at night. Furthermore, on holiday I deliberately avoided all emails and made use of the handy ‘out of office’ function on my computer. (My wife is a very good partner in reminding me about this should I be otherwise tempted!) Just this week I heard in a report for Breakfast News on BBC that the ‘French approach’ to emails could be considered in the workplace: no email should be sent to a subordinate outside ‘normal working hours’. Clearly for teachers ‘normal working hours’ needs defining and so perhaps this could apply between 7.00pm and 7.00am?

I try to get to bed before 10.00pm rather than waiting to watch the News first before retiring for the night. In my workplace I strove to look for opportunities to delegate work and, yes, to trust others to do things better than me! Even if in my view they didn’t manage this, it is their learning experience that’s important. In addition to this, I very consciously tried not to dwell on imaginary conversations ahead of ‘difficult meetings’: it’s fine to plan for these and consider scenarios but as I walked home of an evening (and this woodland walk was a privilege to savour), I very consciously tried to leave them behind recognising that there’s nothing further I can do until the next day – or after the weekend.

Why worry?

We will all have things which suit us personally and fit with our lifestyles to reduce stress further (and for me this includes prayer and Christian fellowship – as well as time with my wife and family). It’s tremendously important, however, to look for those ‘little extras’ which we can do (or stop doing) when the going gets too tough. This may mean a conversation with your GP but will also involve wise advice from those who know us best along with, perhaps, the tips above over online habits and self-control with our endless ‘what if’ thoughts. As someone has pointed out, 90+% of the things we worry about never happen – and so why worry in the first place?