As I’ve discussed in another thread, email forms a central aspect of the modern work life for many; as I cited in that post, in one study among British white-collar workers, a full 55 work-days per worker are spent on email. So, there should be a way to ensure that the core organizational task of email communication is done in a transparent fashion. The strategy we used here was the Nyaya Health mailarchive. This is a google apps email account to which all emails to the domain @nyayahealth.org are stored. We set this up initially (when you could count our volunteers on two hands) as a way to ensure that all our emails could be housed in one place and could be quickly reviewed for institutional memory purposes. We provided all team members access to this as a point of transparency and efficiency; from our wiki:
“We feel that it is an important aspect of organizational efficiency, history, and transparency that our Nyaya-related emails are housed centrally in one location and open to all Nyaya team members. The primary functions of having an open mail archive are:
1) internal transparency: our email communication, which constitutes a huge portion of how we work, are available for review by other team members as needed;
2) institutional memory: in the cases of transitions of team members, it is helpful to have an archive of previous correspondence on various subject matters or with various individuals
3) efficiency: this can cut-down on the need for forwarding or looking around for lost emails
4) reliability: in the cases in which anything unfortunately happens to a member (death, sickness, etc.), we need to be able to maintain all the hard work and efforts and contacts of that member.
5) team coherence: members are less likely to disobey basic rules of etiquette (e.g., not respecting others, not engaging in productive and non-judgment dialogue)”
This, I think, is a fairly unique idea: all email communication within the organization is open to everyone within the organization. Another way that I’ve personally thought about this is as follows, which I wrote in an email to some of our leaders: Security on the internet is so hideously poor such that there could easily come a time when all that we have ever emailed becomes fully available to the public, including donors and team members. Whenever we write an email, we should keep this in mind, and write positively and respectfully. We can of course write informally and tell jokes and be very critical of each other, our work, the government etc. I don’t think that being respectful inhibits critical dialogue; rather if we are disrespectful then we’ve just closed avenues for honest and critical and reflective dialogue and the opportunity for honesty. Furthermore, when we are in the mindset that what we write could be read by anyone, we are more likely to say, “maybe that will make a good blog or wiki entry or institutional memory document” rather than an email, email being a necessary crutch that should be minimized since it is such an inefficient mode of communication. This is a supremely challenging goal, and one that I fail to achieve on so many occasions, but I had hoped that the mailarchive could help influence our organizational culture in a positive way. Unfortunately, this has not worked out as well as it could have, and the mailarchive facilitated just the opposite of respectful, honest, open dialogue.
We used the mailarchive successfully for nearly four years without much problem, then what happened? Somewhere along the way there was a breakdown of trust between various members of our leadership team, and folks started using the mailarchive to identify he-said-she-said moments to confirm growing biases against each other. This ultimately led to one particularly very bad decision that has taken us a few months to recover from and at significant monetary costs. Our team recovered, and I believe our unity and ties as an organization is as strong as ever, but the dangers of the mailarchive was exposed. I think these sorts of interpersonal conflicts are natural in any small organization, but the presence of an ongoing record of our communications, especially in email form that poses such challenges to interpretation, fueled the fire. This, I will note, was despite clear guidelines on the wiki to not do precisely this:
“One thing that Nyaya members agree not to do: read the email archive regularly. The mail archive is a privilege and a pact between each other to. The mail archive is simply not meant for that purpose; since the risk is real given human nature, the following points are worth noting, particularly for Nyaya team leaders/managers:
1) Do not “jump into” another conversation that you come across in the archive. Doing that is like a boss snooping around the corner between two officemates in their cubicles.
2) Do not read the archive; other people are managing all the emails in the archive and it is wickedly inefficient to be reading those. Though it is tempting to think one can be helpful in such situations, it is very unlikely to be productive and is going to feel intrusive and make one feel less inclined to using @nyaya emails.
3) People are entitled to having private threads without intrusion by managers, just as in the non-virtual organizations people have lunches, phone calls, cubicle chats, etc. The flip side of this on the part of all team members is above, in the section on collaboration and efficiency: that most conversations should be focussed on wiki, team@, or other collaborative content.”
The point is, I think, that there comes a time where “information overload” is just not mentally healthy. When we start interacting with each other as largely electronically constructed ideotypes rather than actual persons, our natural abilities to communicate break down. I still feel strongly that, if a Givewell or a donor wants to read our mailarchive, we should give them the password, and that our members should write emails in a respectful and open way that allows for that. But open access to too much information just led to too much conflict.
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Duncan Maru, MD, PhD is a co-founder and President of Nyaya Health. He is currently a resident in the Internal Medicine – Pediatrics program and fellow in Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Boston. This post is part of a series on the logistical challenges of achieving transparent operations
