The Morning Inbox Problem: Email Reply Priorities and Organizational Timing Norms

To which emails do employees first respond? This paper explores the near-universal element of being an employee responsible for attending to an organizational email account. Using a large email corpus of an organization across five years, we explore various response heuristics that might be guiding how organizational members make reply priority decisions. Study 1 simulates what we call the “morning inbox problem”—deciding whom to reply to when emails from multiple respondents have been received. Our analysis reveals that organizational members use the following heuristics in reply priority decisions: (a) order of arrival, (b) contents that can be inferred from the subject line rather than from the email body, (c) effort required to reply, and (d) expectation the sender has with respect to time-to-response of the email. These patterns of reply priority reveal a new construct—organizational timing norms, which are norms that govern the temporal dimension of intraorganizational interactions. Study 2 explores the organizational implications of timing norm violations. We show that organizational members sending out-of-sync replies constitute a “bottleneck” in organizational communication and is a predictor of employee turnover. We discuss the implications of our discoveries and underscore the potential value of studying timing norms in organizational routines.