I was standing in a beautiful trout stream in the Pyrenees Mountains talking with my fishing guide, Gregory Dolet, about flies, casting, sight fishing and, of course, the question inevitably came up of what I did in the “real world.”

I gave Greg my 10 second elevator speech that we at PEP® worldwide “helped people get more of the right work done in less time, with less stress, from wherever they want, from wherever they are” which lead to how we do what we do and the challenges we see people facing while striving to do their jobs well.

Not surprisingly, the subject of email came up pretty quickly. It turns out that in his “real world” that Greg was an entomologist who consulted for several organizations which developed Environmental Impact Studies in France. He mainly worked with three organizations; one with just a couple of people, another with about twenty people, and another with over 300 people. Not surprisingly, the time and the number of emails needed to get his job rose exponentially to the number of people in the organization making it many times more difficult to get the job done for the large organization.

This reinforces, as we have seen in the US, that the larger the organization the more difficult it is to get things done. We’re not suggesting that we should massively shrink organizations, but we do offer that large organizations should seriously reassess how they communicate and acknowledge that when people exceed receiving about 100 emails a day that they’re going to have problems keeping up with everything requested of them.

We’ve offered suggestions in earlier blogs of how this can be done. (See our blogs under the category of EMAIL). Clearer & crisper communication adhering to defined and understood protocols supported and followed by top leadership, will go a long way to help large organizations improve effectiveness.