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.

Measuring Effectiveness & Efficiency Within Email

In developing the Orla service model we understood the imperative of actually demonstrating that a change to the Orla would deliver value to both the people who adopt it and the organizations they work for. We therefore commissioned Phil Graves of www.philipgraves.net to develop a stand-up survey methodology which is used during the Phase 1 Pilot part of our service delivery model.

The Orla survey methodology involves questionnaires that cover workers' own definitions of effectiveness. The aim is to understand some of the more subjective measures that people use to gauge their own performance in the key areas of efficiency and effectiveness.

To ensure the statistical integrity of this measurement exercise, qualitative research was undertaken, with two intentionally broad objectives:

• What do office workers think about their efficiency and effectiveness? What constitutes being efficient / effective, and what tells workers that they have been efficient / effective?

• How do Outlook and email impact on workers' efficiency and effectiveness, and the demand for their time? Put another way: If a product were to make their email life easier, how would they know it had worked?

Whilst the aim of the research was to develop questions that would help us to measure the impact of Orla, our approach was to analyse people's behaviour, thoughts and feelings rather than to question respondents more directly (since their post-rationalised answers are rarely accurate).

'Efficiency' and 'effectiveness' are defined as follows:

• Efficiency = the way of working.

• Effectiveness = the results of working.

Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with people who worked in the offices of large or medium-sized organisations. All were users of email and worked in environments where email communication was frequent. The sample included a cross-section of ages (from 23 to 50), and both sexes were represented. By necessity, all interviewees were based in the South-east of England.

In addition, the behaviour and thoughts of people were solicited by email (again using very open questions) to explore the extent to which the attitudes identified in the in-depth interviews were prevalent more widely. These surveys included respondents in the UK, the US and Canada.

Not surprisingly, since the computer, the Internet, Outlook and even many corporations are global entities, no significant differences across regions were found. Consequently, whilst cultural differences in communication undoubtedly exist between countries (as they do between organisations), the results are believed to be applicable in all English-speaking countries.

A number of themes emerged consistently in the research:

• Perceptions of efficiency fell into three categories:

• Time-related: working quickly; being able to prioritise work.

• Emotional: feeling good about work; feeling motivated and appreciated; feeling energised; feeling in control; feeling a sense of accomplishment; sleeping better.

• Extrinsic: keeping others happy; meeting deadlines; achieving objectives.

An 'efficient day' almost always involves a visual indicator of work that has been completed: either an empty inbox or a completed task list (the latter being considered more satisfying, since the inbox will refill outside of their control).

• Perceptions of effectiveness also fell into three categories:

• Time-related: spending longer at work; working through lunch.

• Mindset: being proactive rather than purely reactive; making decisions more quickly; staying focused on a single task without being distracted; anticipating and avoiding problems.

• Focus: considering broader corporate issues, not just managing the task.

Most people felt that email controls their working day (with work and social emails having a similar impact) – it is distracting and demanding.

For most people, being in control of emails was synonymous with good time-management generally. When offered a 'magic wish' for email, a frequent request was that emails would organise themselves.

People also frequently retained emails for the purpose of covering their own back.

Some respondents reported that there was an expectation within their organisations that emails would be met with an almost instant response, and that it was annoying when this did not occur. Typically, these people made no use of priority flags on the emails they sent.

Based on the lessons we learned from this research, we devised the Orla Survey System, as follows:

• Day 1 Survey Before Orla Essentials Learning, taking in:

• Efficiency
• Email Volume
• Frequency
• Learning Development

• Day 1 Survey Immediately After Orla Essentials Learning, taking in:

• Feedback on Learning
• Feedback on Orla
• Learning More
• Worker Comments

• Learning Folio, taking in the 14-day Orla Essentials Learning Experience:

• The extent to which the three key organised workload characteristics were covered
• The extent to which the 4D decision-making methodology has been mastered
• Learning time engaged
• Change considerations generally
• Orla change considerations specifically
• Worker Comments
• Orla Advanced programmes favoured

• Day 15 Survey After Orla Essential Learning, taking in:

• Efficiency
• Email Volume
• Frequency
• Using Orla
• Value

In a future post (soon) I shall share with you some of the outcomes of Orla using these metrics. Very provocative stuff!

“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