Twitter is just paranoid info overload

Perish the thought that Twitter ever make it past the corporate firewall. Bringing this 'tool' into the workplace is an absolute recipe for disaster. Imagine the interruptive capacity of email married to chat, sister of SMS. Admittedly I have signed up and experimented with it myself and see it as a useful tool to keep appraised of the movements and meanderings of a half a dozen people, but any more than that, for me at least, it's just overload. I have to laugh when I check out who is following who and see that some people are following TENS OF THOUSANDS of people. I mean, come on! If you have not cottoned on to Twitter yet take this 4 minute animation in. Right on the money!

SIMONE research confirms the bleedin’ obvious

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/008200903071221.htm

Er… these very smart chappies have modeled corporate email patterns and concluded what we already know. Corporate managers can improve e-mail efficiency simply by scheduling e-mail processing times across an organisation. This approach avoids the inherent distraction of continual e-mail interruptions throughout the working day, allowing employees to focus their efforts on primary tasks at other times – according to their Press Release blurb.The solution also places emphasis on allowing time for necessary e-mail and so removes pressure from employees who feel constantly obliged to check and respond to e-mails. Take it away Captain Obvious!

This is what happens when you think it through for yourself

In a Smartbiz article, Brian Murphy discusses the five most common email-management mistakes that businesses are making today:

1. Believing it is feasible to run your business without some form of email-management system.

2. Destroying email by auto purges or mailbox caps. This contravenes record-keeping policies and obligations across many legal compliance and business risk-management fronts.

3. Using backups as an archive. The problem with this approach is that un-indexed email records are difficult and expensive to search, especially when the request for such records is typically mission- or business-risk-critical.

4. Assuming that existing document-management systems are an acceptable technology to handle email archiving. The volume and indexing challenges for email archiving across an enterprise are substantially different from standard document-management challenges.

5. Implementing an email retention policy that was optimized for paper. Email is not paper. The classification processes used for paper simply don't work with email because:

• The sheer volume of email exchanged makes it impractical to classify everything;
• Everyone uses email;
• The administration of email isn't easily delegated, and
• There's an almost infinite number of possible classification criteria, making it impractical for end users to classify all of their messages.

Email training - bah humbug!

The challenges of ‘email-as-problem’ in the modern workplace are well understood. Many training methods have been consistently tried since the scale of the issue raised its head more than 10 years ago. However, since ‘email-as-problem’ is caused by technology, a crucial part of the solution must be based in technology. Without technology to enable the change to the good, most email-training initiatives fail to deliver long-lasting meaningful outcomes, as they ultimately stand or fall on changing people’s behaviour.

Not unexpectedly, the change-management challenge rears it head and stands in the way of universal success.

With email rapidly becoming an all-consuming problem for both workers and the enterprises they serve, email can be said to have gone far beyond the realms of a ‘Killer App’ and taken on the qualities of a ’Zombie App. The pressures of time,(1) incumbent investments in non-performing technologies, (2) senior management reluctance to recognise email as a significant issue to be addressed (3) and the perennial challenge of change (4) all conspire to make ‘email-as-problem’ an intractable dilemma that all-too-often falls into the ‘too hard’ basket.

Focused, comprehensive user training in the effective use of email has been shown, on occasion, to bear significant fruit. The key here is focused - most email training doesn't come up to snuff.

Dr. Monica Seeley, CEO of Mesmo Consultancy, is a change specialist based in the United Kingdom. She develops email charters and tailored workshops for companies seeking to improve their workflow-management processes. She also writes for the Times of London from time to time. Here’s an example of how the approach she adopted has brought about improvements in email management: (5)

In 2004, a UK construction company was seeking assistance in getting to grips with ‘email-as-problem’. An internal change-management programme was created, called ‘Easy Email’ as a distinctive brand. The programme was delivered enterprise-wide to a dispersed and mobile workforce of several hundred people, involving optional training and an intensive internal marketing campaign.

Brought about as a result of widespread internal complaints about staff spending too much time on email, with their inboxes always full, Dr. Seeley’s focus groups revealed that:

• Email volume was too great.
  
• Attachment sizes were problematic.
  
• People were using email to ‘get the monkey off their backs’.
  
• Unrealistic expectations of an immediate response were de rigueur.
  
• Emails were preferred to talking.
  
• Notions of compliance were not a key consideration in the psyche of the workforce.

The ‘Easy-Mail’ programme involved an Outlook fitness check; the crafting of an email best-practice user guide; workshops and online tips and tricks for effective email management. The programme was wrapped in an email charter called CUSTOMS (Communicate clearly, Use attachments with care, Stay within the law, Think of the recipient, Organise your time at your inbox, Master the software, Select the right way to communicate).

The programme was specifically branded and aggressively marketed internally. It involved office posters, comprehensive information packs for each person, a pocket-sized CUSTOMS guide, stickers, a calendar with a ‘tip per month’ and a copy of the slide presentation used at the workshops. The intention was to make it fun as well as part of daily work.

Out of 1,000 employees, 400 staff participated, 65% attended the optional workshops and 75% returned the surveys. All respondents reported that the time spent learning was worthwhile and that they would each be doing at least one thing differently, confirming that a change in email behaviour was intended by those responding.

Three months later, informal feedback revealed that the initiative had reduced the number of times per day people felt they needed to check email, reducing stress levels and some of the pressure around email. Additional benefits included improved time-use effectiveness and inculcating a new approach to email and methods of communicating.

’Easy-Mail’ continued after the formal programme had ended, taking in continuing hints and tips and ‘presence’ inside the firm.

This programme highlighted the technical issues surrounding email overload, so internal systems adjustments were carried out, leading to the removal of inbox quotas and the implementation of centralised storage of email archives.

Of course, Dr Seely's trainees were actually undertaking two education exercises. Managing email as a culture and also as a technology. In the Master the software piece, it begs the question as to why the software had to be mastered in the first place. Implicitly, therefore, the software was mastering the user.

Now there's a thought!

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1 The average desk worker has 36 hours of unfinished work on his desk and spends 3 hours per week sorting piles trying to find the project to work on next: Richard Swenson: The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits (1995) Navpress.

2 The Trouble With Computers: Thomas K. Landauer (1995) MIT Press.

3 Nancy Flynn, Executive Director, ePolicy Institute, Email Rules, Free Report (2003) Retrieved April 1, 2007 from http://www.dominionbluetech.com/resources/resource3.pdf

4 Change invokes a wide range of responses in people, from excitement and enthusiasm to panic, fear, depression, feelings of loss and confusion. Nancy Barger, The Challenge of Change in Organizations Helping Employees Thrive in the New Frontier (1995), David Black Press

5 Reported in: E-mail Management, Goodman, (2006), Chapter 14 pp 87-90.

“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