Could your association’s staff communicate effectively if you eliminated all internal emails?

According to an analysis by McKinsey Global Institute, employees spend 28 percent of their work hours on email, and email remains by far the most distracting aspect of work. The research also notes that employees check email about 11 times per hour, and the vast majority read their incoming emails within minutes, or even seconds, of it arriving in their inbox.

The Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS) embarked on a journey more than a year ago to become a more efficient team. Our small-staff association was growing fast, putting a lot of pressure on ATLIS’ team to keep up with all the tasks and projects at hand. Something drastic had to be done to not only provide relief to the team but also to set up efficient workflows ahead of the staff growth we’re anticipating.

How It Started

We began by going all in on Asana, a project management software. At first, a few of us were using it to manage more complicated projects, such as our annual conference or organizing our educational offerings, but we decided that the entire team, including the CEO, would transition to the software to add consistency and efficiency into how we work as a decentralized team.

To get staff comfortable with the tool, we also reframed our staff meetings to talk about how everyone was using the project management software. For example, we discussed how we would assign tasks to each other and when it was appropriate to flag something as high priority. The more we discussed how we were each using it, the easier and more consistent it got. To this day, we still share tips and tricks with one another to improve our workflows even further.

The software also allows for easy assignments within a project. For example, if the education team organizes an upcoming webinar, the templated workflow we established in the system automatically alerts the correct person when it’s time to add the webinar offering to the website and when she can begin the marketing and outreach. Each step is covered and there’s clarity around who is responsible for what. Asana also had integrations with ATLIS’s email and storage (Google Workplace) and our communication platform (Slack), which drove additional efficiencies. “

Where It’s Going

While we didn’t set out to eliminate all internal email, over time, our team had no need to email each other. Casual conversations and updates were happening in a messaging platform and all work projects were being assigned and discussed in the project management software.

Over the course of a year, the ATLIS team continued to refine how it communicates and its approach to project-based workflows. Eventually, the efficiency of these workflows led to some other burnout-squashing outcomes as well. For example, we all started noticing that our weeks felt far more productive. Because of this, we experimented with a four-day work week, and eventually the pilot became permanent.

While it took a significant investment of time and training focused on using the technology and reworking the approach to internal communications, the outcomes have far surpassed what the team originally expected. Our members get better service, our team’s efforts are maximized, and we’ve been able to add significant projects to our plates that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to tackle if we were wasting nearly 30 percent of our work week on emails.

While this system could work for an association of any size, keep in mind that no technology will result in big changes unless it’s accompanied by cultural changes within the organization. Here at ATLIS, our four-day work weeks and zero internal emails came from a commitment to refining the process, not because we all started using project management software.

To make that shift in your own association, it’s important to help employees see the goal of these efforts and how it’s going to make their work lives better.