The Organisation Where Everyone Was Busy and Nothing Was Moving

The CEO who contacted me didn't think she had a technology problem. She thought she might have a people problem — or possibly a culture problem. Her senior team were working long hours. Meetings were full. Inboxes were overflowing. And yet the organisation felt stuck. Important work moved slowly. Decisions that should have been straightforward took weeks. Nobody could quite explain why.

We started by looking at internal email.

Over a three-month period, the senior management team were each sending an average of 1,200 internal emails. Not total emails — internal ones. Not including replies, forwards, or anything going outside the organisation. Just emails written and sent to colleagues.

If each one took five minutes — to write, to decide who needed to be copied, to find the relevant attachment, to re-read the thread for context before hitting send — that's 91 hours per person over three months. More than an hour every working day, consumed purely by the act of creating internal email. Before anyone had read, replied to, searched for, or followed up on a single one of them.

And most of those emails weren't going to one person. They were going to two, three, sometimes five. The time cost on the receiving end dwarfed what it took to send them.

The organisation didn't have a people problem. It had a workflow problem. And email was at the centre of it.

Email is a communication tool. It was designed for sending messages between people — and for that purpose, it still works perfectly well. The problem is that somewhere along the way, most organisations started using it as something else entirely: a task management system, a document store, a decision log, a project tracker, and an approval process all rolled into one. It is spectacularly badly suited to all of those things.

When a task lives in an email, ownership is unclear. When a decision is made over a thread, the context is buried and invisible to anyone who wasn't copied in at the right moment. When a document is shared as an attachment, you immediately have two versions in two inboxes, and the moment someone replies with changes you have three. When a colleague leaves, their email archive goes with them — and so does everything that was only documented there.

None of this is anybody's fault. It's what happens when a tool that was designed for one purpose gets pressed into service for everything, because it's familiar and it's always been there.

The fix for this organisation wasn't a new system. Everything they needed was already included in their Microsoft 365 subscription, largely unused.

Tasks and actions moved into Planner. Instead of an email saying "can you look into this?" disappearing into someone's inbox, work was assigned, tracked, and visible. Everyone could see what was in progress, what was waiting, and what was overdue — without sending a single chasing email.

Discussions moved into Teams channels. Instead of decisions being made in private email threads, conversations happened in shared spaces where the full team had context. New starters could read back through a channel and understand how a decision had been reached. Nobody had to forward a three-week-old thread to bring someone up to speed.

Documents moved into SharePoint. One version, in one place, with a full history of changes. No more "sorry, can you send me the latest version?" No more discovering that two people had been editing different copies simultaneously. No more documents disappearing when someone left.

None of this required a training programme or a change management consultancy. It required a clear decision about which tool was for which purpose, communicated simply, and followed consistently.

Within a few weeks the difference was visible. Senior leaders were spending less time in their inboxes and more time on the work that actually needed their attention. Decisions that had been getting lost in threads were getting made and recorded in places where everyone could see them. The sense of being busy without making progress — that particular, demoralising feeling — started to lift.

The CEO's instinct that something was wrong had been right. She'd just been looking in the wrong place for the cause. The people were fine. The process was the problem.

Email has its place. As a workflow tool, it is one of the most expensive habits an organisation can have — not because of what it costs to run, but because of what it costs in time, clarity, and momentum every single day.