The participants who benefited most were the ones with the highest levels of self-efficacy (a belief in one’s ability to exert control over work and achieve desirable outcomes).
In other words, only when people believe they can make the changes will they actually succeed and reap the benefits.
KEY MESSAGES
Our research shows how important it is for initiatives aimed at changing employees’ habits to accommodate individual preferences so that they have control over what they change.
To improve the email habits of workers, organisations should therefore provide plans to help them decide which habits might need altering, while leaving the decision to the individual about what to implement in the context of their role.
Coupled with this, organisations should provide self-efficacy training to give staff the resources and confidence to change their habits.
That will maximise the chances of success, helping as many people as possible to ditch those dysfunctional work-email habits and develop better, more effective ways of working.
Emma Russel, Kevin Daniels, Marc Fullman and Tom Jackson are professors, researchers and lecturers at the Universities of Sussex, East Anglia and Loughborough. This commentary first appeared on The Conversation.
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