Email. Our lives wouldn’t be the same without it. It is a tool that has revolutionized the workplace, improved communication and allowed employees to accomplish more in less time. However, if mismanaged, it can have a devastating effect on productivity and profits.

Have you ever stopped to consider your organization’s email culture? How do your employees use email? How do they manage it? How do they send it? How do they save it? The habits employees adopt, whether positive or negative, can be contagious, and suddenly your business has its own email culture.

Habits? Contagious? When you consider how many impressions email messages have on each person in your organization daily, you can quickly understand how email practices can become cultural.

Here is just one example of how an email culture can evolve: A boss realizes that he needs to call an urgent meeting with three of his managers. He sends an email calling the meeting to start in the next 15 minutes. Two of the three see the email and respond. The third, who is working on an important project, does not have his inbox open and misses the meeting, to the “disappointment” of his boss.

Manager No. 3 has now learned that he can never turn his email off for fear of missing an important email. But it doesn’t stop there. It rolls downhill. Because their boss modeled that behavior for them, the three managers have now been given “permission” to use email as an urgent delivery system. They use it in their departments, and very quickly, the entire organization is infected with this virus. No one can turn off his or her email for fear of missing something vital. Employees become slaves to the “ding” or the flash of a newly arrived email message and stop productive work anytime an email comes in, even if it’s just spam.

And that’s just one example. Think of the practices of copying everyone under the sun, just so no one—even those only remotely interested in the topic—is missed. Or how about using email as a chat room with multiple recipients to resolve dilemmas? Or how about using email to critique someone’s performance? One person does it, others do it. Culture is changed.

Email can be extremely costly if not used effectively. When you consider the average recovery time from any interruption is about four minutes, you can imagine the cost to your organization when people look up every time an email is received. Do the math. If you stop what you’re doing every time you receive an email and get 30 emails in one day, that equals 120 minutes of recovery time—two hours of waste! And that doesn’t include the time spent handling the email. Now multiply that by every employee, everyday, and you can see how productivity and profitability can seriously begin to drop. Said another way, if each worker in a 20-person department is interrupted by only 15 email dings a day, the interruption recovery time for that department is 100 hours per week.

The compound impact can be startling. Reclaiming that one hour daily for a 20-person department enables a net productivity gain of 100 hours per week—or two and a half full-time employees. Reclaiming one half-hour daily per employee enables a net gain of 50 hours per week. In either case, at least one full headcount can be reclaimed.

Here are some actions that can bring your organization great returns.

In order to instantly combat this loss, give everyone in your organization permission to turn off auto-receive and instead schedule email deliveries every 90 to 120 minutes. This practice changes the number of interruptions from continual to only five to eight daily, in essence shortening recovery time to only about 30 minutes daily—a saving of 90 minutes added back to your bottom line. The less frequently people check their inboxes, the more productive they can be.

Here are a few more tips to help you create a positive office email culture, excerpted from our e-book, “Reclaim Your Workplace Email Productivity: Add BIG BUCKS to Your Bottom Line” (available on Amazon and at www.InboxDetox.com/reclaim).

1. Never use email as an urgent delivery system. If there is an urgent matter or you need a response in under three hours, pick up the phone or walk down the hall. Model this highly productive behavior.
2. Turn off auto send and receive department-wide.Agree within your company or department that automatic send/receive is turned off, dings and reminders are turned off, and that co-workers will proactively retrieve their email instead of it interrupting them as it is received.
3. Create space to do productive work. Agree that everyone has “permission” to check email only five times daily: upon arrival, midmorning, after lunch, midafternoon and half an hour before end of day. A real stretch would be twice a day (not impossible!).
4. Don’t “e-nag.” Don’t call someone 10 minutes after you’ve sent an email to ask if he or she received your message. If it is important enough to do that, call first to advise it is coming. Remember that most people sending an email expect a response within 24 hours, not 24 minutes.
5. Pick up the phone. When dialogue is needed, email is not. Actual conversation is useful for complicated, delicate and potentially emotional communications.

Cultures can be positive or negative, energizing or toxic. Your organization has an email culture, whether you realize it or not. Knowing that culture is a key opportunity for you as a leader and modeling the proactive and energizing behaviors can go straight to your bottom line.

When is the last time you checked your email?