#7 of 7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery: Helps to manage expectations

For leaders and managers, using Delay Delivery helps you control expectations and have influence with others – staff, colleagues and clients.

Dealing with email out-of-hours is a strategy used by staff at all levels to helps reduce the sense of overload that would ensue if email were allowed to build up. It is usually motivated by a desire to catch-up with and keep on top of work tasks.

 However, a number of studies have shown that frequently checking of email out-of-hours does not make a tangible difference to workers’ perceptions of overload. It appears that the act of checking email might, in itself, be considered work (even if there was no work email to subsequently deal with). As a result, it is the frequent ‘checking’, rather than ‘dealing’ with email, that maintains the sense of overload.

It seems the norms and expectations for checking and quickly responding to email during work hours continue for after-hours messages as well, even if the sender only intends to clear his/her work tasks, rather than expect an out-of-hours response.

When you send a message that arrives at odd hours, recipients will wonder if they are expected to respond straight away or soon or some time later - it's difficult for them to know when they are expected to respond. In effect, you are training the people around you that you are available outside work hours. Do you really want them starting to count on that?

So you can see that it would be better to use Delay Delivery to manage those expectations!

Click here to see the full White Paper on these 7 Reasons to Use Delay Delivery for Your Outgoing Email or click here if you would like the one page version