Significantly Improved Worker Productivity – Bang for your Orla Buck

The results that people experience after the Orla Essentials programme are universal, and can be summarised as follows: Adoption 50% of people embrace Orla. These workers agree that the non-intuitive design of Outlook has caused them problems, and they're eager to build on the Orla Essentials programme. 30% of people inadvertently resist Orla but are open to persuasion through the passage of time and exposure to the Orla Advanced programmes. These workers need greater exposure to the value that Orla represents, and that can't be thoroughly demonstrated during the mere 2 hours and 40 minutes of the Orla Essentials learning programme. 10% of people overtly resist Orla for good reasons. These people are those who have already established a truly effective personal workflow-management methodology for themselves and see no value in changing the way they work. They are quite often the 'power' Outlook users, people who are intrinsically well-organised or workers who deal with only a very low volume of email. 10% of people overtly resist Orla for poor reasons. These are the folks who simply refuse to move their cheese. These are quite often the ones who express significant disaffection with the change initiative and who are heard the loudest. Performance Improvement Time is the most objective measurement of performance improvement (see 'Value' below), but many other measures of effectiveness and efficiency improvement are also reported. Generally, these include a statistically significant:

• Reduction in the number of emails in the inbox.
• Improvement in overall personal productivity.
• Improvement in the pressure of time and workplace stress.
• Mastery of the 4D decision-making methodology and the three key workload organisational concepts.
• Confidence in the Orla system.

Satisfaction A statistically significant proportion of workers report that if they were to lose the Orla Interface from their copy of Outlook for any reason, they would definitely want to have it reinstalled. Orla has the effect of allowing workers to appreciate the ineffectiveness of the Inbox-Subfolder Paradigm. Through the use of an intuitive 4D decision-making process and the Outlook Calendar/Taskpad view, a much better workflow-management methodology is revealed, one that appeals to the sense of a 'smarter' way of working. The majority of workers report that they wish they'd had Orla for as long as they had email. Value Orla results reveal that a statistically significant proportion of workers:

• Agree that Orla is definitely a worthwhile investment on the part of their employer.
• Would have no hesitation in recommending Orla to their colleagues and friends.Are time-improved by a minimum of 30 minutes each day.
• Whilst the Orla Essentials programme delivers an average minimum time-effectiveness improvement per worker of 30 minutes per day, after three Orla Advanced Learning programmes have been undertaken, the average minimum time-effectiveness improvement per worker is 120 minutes per day.

On the basis of time improvements alone, the average minimum financial return on investment for each worker undergoing the Orla Essentials programme is at least 250% per day.

Recent talk gets me thinking “what’s wrong with people!…”

I gave a presentation yesterday here in Perth to a gathering of about 30 SME business owners who were looking at ways to get more with less during these testing economic times. As I was coming to the end of my one hour talk it occurred to me that the Send-Receive-File email management paradigm has a great deal to answer for. The arguments for sorting out the email issue are so compelling (and at Orla we all eat our own dog food and are INCREDIBLY productive when it comes to organizing and prioritizing our daily work) that I imagined website activity from Western Australia would have a bit of a upward blip during the 24 hours which followed. Barely in fact. That said, I did meet a very charming lady from a WA company who is all over the email as problem with her team at work. Got a lovely follow up mail this morning saying they learned a lot from the talk and were implementing the ideas I presented to them. Nice!

The talk can be downloaded here

“If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

It’s worth a few moments to reflect upon how far we have travelled with email in the last 15 years.

Volume – in 2006, it was estimated that genuine emails are sent by 1.1 billion emails users around the world each day, with 50 billion genuine messages dispatched daily accompanied by at least 120 billion spam. (1) Email traffic is growing at between 10% and 25% per year. (2)

Size - the size of personal email records is increasing exponentially. One study reports that 27% of email-using employees have reached or exceeded the amount of storage space allowed at work. (3)

Overuse - overuse of email is impacting on user effectiveness. 59% of employed American adults admit to wasting a lot of time searching for lost email. Moreover, between 47% (those who earn less than USD35,000 annually) and 65% (those earning greater than USD75,000 per annum) admit to wasting time looking for email they know they’ve received.(4)

Productivity - email has had a profound impact on individual productivity. More than 25% of employed US adults acknowledge that the volume of email they receive causes them to fall behind in their work.(5). In 2005 the Wall Street Journal reported that white-collar workers waste 40% of their day, not because they aren’t smart but because they were never taught organizing skills to function in the modern workplace.(6) A typical knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day (or roughly 30% of the work day) searching for information. (7) In a 2007 study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, such as writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming email. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.(8) “I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist and co-author of the paper. “If it’s this bad at Microsoft,” Mr. Horvitz added, “it has to be bad at other companies, too.”

Morale & Health - email causes stress. (9) According to some reports, 80% of existing health expenditure is now stress-related. (10) In 1999 it was estimated that job-related stress cost US industry USD300 billion p.a. (11) 71% of white-collar workers feel stressed about the amount of information they must process and act on while doing business; 60% feel overwhelmed.(12)

In 2005 AOL conducted a survey of 4,000 email users on email reliance, and reported ‘an obsessive-compulsive need to check email morning, noon and night.’(13)

42% of vacationers check their business email while on holiday, and 23% check it on the weekend.(14) Employees are taking an average of 1 min 44 seconds to reply to a message, with 70% of employees responding within 6 seconds! The disruption caused is 64 seconds before they get back to work; 40% of such interruptions are self-generated (i.e. not caused by the email pop up). (15)

This 2001 research confirmed the findings of a 1994 study, namely that people answer emails as they arrive, treating the technology as they would the telephone.(16) The typical US worker is interrupted by communications technology once every 10 minutes.(17) A 2004 study reported that both interruptions and the consequent task-switching caused by email takes a toll on workers, who tend to spend an average of only three minutes working on any one activity before switching to another.(18)

Negative health effects of this modern phenomenon were reported as early as 1989.(19) Studies showed that the increased pace of work leads to stress, (20)(21)(22) that employee stress can cause serious problems for the organization, (23) and that the pressure of email leads to a reduction in IQ greater than that caused by the use of cannabis (24). In a study undertaken by the University of London, “Respondents' minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night's sleep.”

So, dear readers, if anything is in need of a shot in the arm, it’s got to be email.

Where are all the new ideas?

1 The Radicati Group: www.radicati.com

2 IDC, Worldwide Email Usage Forecast 2002-2006

3 Fortiva and Harris Interactive

4 c.f. Fortiva and Harris Interactive

5 c.f (1)(2)

6 http://online.wsj.com/public/us

7 IDC White Paper: The high cost of not finding information 8/2001

8 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/25multi.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5088&en=f295711cb4a65d9b&ex=1332475200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

9 Australian Psychological Society, Email communication survey (2005)

10 Center for Disease Control & Prevention reported in Fast Company magazine 2/03 pg. 88

11 Data Communication 2/98

12 Institute of the Future, Menlo Park, California

13 AOL, (2005), Email addiction survey cited in Hair M., Renaud, K.V., Ramsey, J., (2006) The influence of self-esteem and locus of control on perceived email related stress pg. 2 (www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbe)

14 Westling, D. (2001) Gartner finds US vacationers addicted to email. Survey shows 42% of users check business email on vacation.

(http://www.gartner.com/5_about/press_room/pr20010702a.html)

15 Jackson, T., Dawson R., & Wilson, D. (2001). The cost of email interruption. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 5, 81-92

16 Markus, M. L., (1994). Finding a happy medium: Explaining the negative effects of electronic communication on social life at work. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 12, 119-312

17 2005 Institute for Future & Gallop

18 Gonzalez, V. M., & Mark G. (2004). Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness: managing multiple working spheres. In proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 113-120). ACM Press.

19 Levine, R.V., Lynch, K., Miyake, K., & Lucia, M., (1989). The type A city: Coronary heart disease and the pace of life. Journal of Behavioral Medicine (Historical Archive), 12, 509-524

20 Arndt, R. (1987). Work pace, stress, and cumulative trauma disorders. Journal of Hand Surgery, 5, 866-869

21 Houtman, I. L., Bongers, P. M., Smulders, P. G., & Kompie, M. A. (1994) Psychosocial stressors at work and musculoskeletal problems. Scandinavian Journal of Work and Environmental Health, 20, 139-145.

22 Steptoe, A., Fieldman, G., Evans, O., & Perry, L. (1993). Control over work pace, job strain and cardiovascular responses in middle-aged men. Journal of Hypertension, 11, 751-759.

23 Calabrese, J.R., Kling, M. A., & Gold, P.W. (1987). Alterations in immunocompetence during stress, bereavement and depression: Focus on neuroendocrine regulation, American Journal of Psychiatry, 144, 1123-1134.

24 http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1465973,00.html