There’s a scene in the movie Bruce Almighty in which Jim Carrey’s character, stepping in to play God, hears the prayers of thousands of people all at once. Overwhelmed by the noise, he handles it in the most efficient way possible: a “reply all” e-mail. As you might expect, chaos ensues in a flood of unintended consequences.
Employees today face a similar information overload, made exponentially worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the crisis, research from International Data Corporation (IDC) found that U.S. employees received more than 576 billion e-mails a year.
