Currently reading Bicudo de Castro (2025): “Quantifying the burden of organisational bulk emails in a business school”

Big pet peeve of mine: Organisational bulk emails, i.e. emails from within the organisation that are sent out to everybody (or at least a large list of people). In my experience often without any obvious thought behind why this message needs to go to everybody, and how to make it efficient in information transfer. So estimating the costs of this practice is very interesting!

I was mostly curious about the assumptions that went into calculations of how much time people spend on these types of emails. Yes, counting the number of emails in a typical inbox in a year seems straightforward, as adding up the number of words in them, but then there are also assumptions like the 238 words per minute silent reading time, or the 64s “recovery time” between finishing reading email and returning back to work. Based on this, Bicudo de Castro (2025) estimates 18.5 h reading time for organisational bulk emails per year for one specific employee. That is only about 1% of 1690 total work hours, and for for 200ish employees in that organisation, that means 300k AUD cost per year. And for people who do not ignore emails, those 18.5 hours are probably a lower boundary estimate, since in my experience many organisational emails also contain links or attachments that people are supposed to have a look at. And once you are out in your browser, who knows how easily you might get sidetracked by other things on that website or the internet in general…

A really big pet peeve of mine in connection with this is also bad handling of information in multiple languages. In one of the regular bulk emails I get and that really annoys me, there is always a collection of a handful or so links to highlighted articles. However, the Swedish and English lists are not always listing the same articles just in different languages. Typically, not all content that exists in Swedish has been translated and therefore there are no corresponding links in the English list, so I usually scan both languages to make sure I am not missing anything important. With a reduced reading speed in Swedish, this is probably also not the best use of my — and others — time. In addition to wasting my time making sure that I get all the relevant information, there is also the hidden cost of showing me — and others — that there is really not a lot of thought put into how international colleagues who are still learning Swedish are to be made to feel welcome and as part of the organisation. Another example, the conference we are running this winter is advertised in a 2-page, nicely formatted Swedish document, with one paragraph with an English summary on the third page. Does that mean that the Swedish version contains so much unneccessary fluff so that it can be summarised in one English paragraph, or is there information missing in the translated version? To find out, lots of Swedish learners will have to invest/waste time and emotions.

And then there is also the question of whether everybody who receives those emails should actually have to read them. The author mentions “casual academic staff” with limited work hours; and I have personal experience with being part-time employed at two universities in different countries at the same time. Do I really need to get everything from both places, and do I need to read all that I am being sent? That means a lot of emails!

This study, to me, raises the question of the benefits of those emails. Are the employees in the author’s institution really 300k AUD more informed? Of course, there is probably an intention behind each of the emails. There are different parts of the organisation that want to inform employees, mentioned in the article are the dean’s office, the teaching and learning centre, and others. The author discusses that in their case, it was impossible to unsubscribe from these emails; no link was given and even personal contact with the senders did not result in removal from the list. This is of course frustrating (and I can see how that would also lead me to doing a study like this one — I have been known to show calculations of the cost of pointless meetings based on average salaries and the amount of time and number of people in a room…).

From my own work as an academic developer I am very much aware of the desire to just email EVERYBODY about new courses, or resources, or meet-ups, etc.. At the same time, I understand that oftentimes the information sent in these emails just seems to vanish into thin air without ever having an impact on any receiver, making us want to send out even more emails to somehow reach people. And then we want to probably double up by sending the same information on other channels, too. But of course, this will make people who actually read most of what is sent to them (like me) feel incredibly spammed (and I really appreciate the author’s discussion of mental health and well-being in this context!), and people who for some reason do not want to read will just ignore on more channels then.

So how do we reach people with the information they need (well, that we think they need) without spamming everybody? I don’t know about the first part. But maybe we can limit the spam-part by, as the author suggests, offering easy options to unsubscribe to at least some of the bulk emails, and by putting checks in place on what goes out to a large list of senders, so that it meets a certain level of importance or urgency.

Bicudo de Castro, V. (2025). Quantifying the burden of organisational bulk emails in a business school. Higher Education Research & Development, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2510662

And now some wave watching pics from a dip two days ago! And since this is my blog I can put as many as I want and you can choose to look at them or not :-)