On my current trip across Europe, I have found myself observing not just the landscapes and cities, but how people live and work. Specifically, how they manage email. From Finland to Estonia and then Greece, I noticed clear differences in the role email plays in productivity. The contrasts reveal not only cultural habits but also how organizations can rethink their own communication practices.

Finland: structure and discipline

In Helsinki, email is still very much part of professional life, but it has been placed into a clear role: external communication, documentation, and formal records. Teams rely heavily on cloud collaboration platforms - Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and project management tools - for daily tasks. It seems Finnish professionals think about email almost as if it were a filing cabinet rather than a working desk.

This disciplined approach minimizes the classic trap of treating the inbox as a to-do list. Workflows live in project systems; email is for confirmation and accountability. The result is less time spent on email triage and more clarity around where decisions are made.

Estonia: bypassing email through digital government

Moving to Tallinn, I encountered something different. Estonia’s digital-first government model has redefined how people interact with official systems. Citizens and companies use secure online portals tied to the national e-ID to handle everything from permits to healthcare. Because so many administrative tasks take place in those platforms, a large portion of “official” communication never occurs via email at all.

For businesses, email still exists for customer and partner communication, but the reduction of bureaucratic email clutter has a clear productivity benefit. It frees the inbox for what it does best: professional correspondence, not government notifications. Estonia’s example demonstrates how digital infrastructure can reshape work habits at a national level.

Germany: The Aldi example

The Finnish and Estonian examples remind me about Aldi, the discount supermarket/grocery chain, founded in Germany and operating in many countries (UK, US, Australia, etc.). Aldi applies the same lean approach to its internal systems as it does in its stores, with most store-level communication handled face-to-face, through noticeboards, team briefings, or store tablets, while store associates typically don’t have individual company email accounts and instead receive information via managers.

Aldi’s internal communication reflects its broader no-frills, efficiency-driven culture. At the corporate level, employees in areas such as logistics, buying, marketing, and HR use email in the conventional way — through platforms like Outlook — to handle cross-department collaboration, supplier communication, and official documentation. Regional and store managers also rely on email to stay connected with headquarters, suppliers, and their teams, ensuring smooth operational flow.

For most store-level staff, however, Aldi avoids individual email accounts, preferring simpler, direct channels. Associates such as cashiers and stockers typically receive information through managers, face-to-face briefings, noticeboards, store tablets, or team huddles. In some markets, Aldi also supplements this with intranet systems for policies and updates, printed memos or posters, and workforce management apps that push schedules or policy changes directly to staff phones.

This streamlined approach keeps communication efficient, cost-effective, and secure. By limiting email accounts to roles that genuinely need them, Aldi reduces overhead, avoids unnecessary complexity for frontline staff, and minimizes risks like phishing. The emphasis on clear, top-down communication ensures consistency while aligning with the company’s lean, practical business model.

Greece: formal email, informal work

Visting Athens brought me back to a more traditional, yet paradoxical, use of email. Email remains central for anything official or client-facing, with a preference for formal, carefully structured messages. However, in practice, day-to-day collaboration rarely happens through email. Teams lean on Viber, WhatsApp, or Microsoft Teams for immediacy.

This creates a dual system: speed in chat apps and formality in email. The challenge is fragmentation. Many professionals manage multiple inboxes (work, university, personal) alongside several messaging platforms. Important decisions sometimes live in threads that are difficult to track later. Productivity, in this case, relies less on tools and more on discipline to capture outcomes across different channels.

What organisations can learn

Comparing these countries, a pattern emerges:

Finland shows how clarity of purpose can make email manageable — use it for documentation, not task management.
Estonia demonstrates the power of digital systems to reduce unnecessary email altogether.
Aldi’s focus on clear, streamlined, top-down communication with limited email use ensures efficiency, cost savings, and security, while reflecting the company’s lean and practical business model.
Greece highlights the risks of fragmentation when chat tools overtake email without structured practices.

The broader lesson is simple: email is most effective when it has a clearly defined role. Treat it as a channel for records and external communication, while relying on dedicated platforms for tasks and collaboration. Above all, ensure that decisions and knowledge are captured in systems that are searchable, shareable, and not buried in someone’s inbox or chat history.

As one of my clients said in a recent workshop I ran for a business group:

“Email is for confirmation, not for conversation “

The AI horizon

Looking ahead, artificial intelligence may reshape email management more radically than geography or culture. AI-driven assistants are already helping with inbox triage, drafting responses, and even extracting action items directly into task managers. If Finland’s strength is discipline, Estonia’s is digital infrastructure, and Greece’s is flexibility, AI could become the unifying force that balances all three.

Instead of spending hours sorting and replying, professionals could allow AI to filter, summarize, and redirect communication to the right place. The impact may be that email finally reclaims its role as a lean, formal channel — while the heavy lifting of sorting, prioritizing, and capturing tasks happens in the background.

✈️ For me, this journey turned the inbox into a lens on email culture. But it also underscored that the future of productivity isn’t about choosing between email, chat, or portals — it’s about how intelligently we orchestrate them together, and increasingly, how AI helps us do so.

Lessons on Email Productivity from Northern to Southern Europe