Organizational Bulk Email Systems: Their Role and Performance in Remote Work

TL;DR

This paper reviews the importance and challenges of organizational bulk email systems in remote work, highlighting issues in message retention, importance perception, and targeting, and proposes a research agenda for future study.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of existing work, shares recent findings, and outlines a research agenda to improve organizational communication in remote work settings.

Findings

Recipients often fail to retain bulk messages.

Recipients and senders have differing views on message importance.

Lack of technology support for targeted messaging.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many employees to work from home. Organizational bulk emails now play a critical role to reach employees with central information in this work-from-home environment. However, we know from our own recent work that organizational bulk email has problems: recipients fail to retain the bulk messages they received from the organization; recipients and senders have different opinions on which bulk messages were important; and communicators lack technology support to better target and design messages. In this position paper, first we review the prior work on evaluating, designing, and prototyping organizational communication systems. Second we review our recent findings and some research techniques we found useful in studying organizational communication. Last we propose a research agenda to study organizational communications in remote work environment and suggest some key questions and potential study directions.