The drivers of organizational email effectiveness
The first stage in building an understanding of how to maximize email effectiveness is to address the issue of process. We are looking to maximize the productivity of people working within a system. Organizations can look to improve email effectiveness systematically through:
- Establishing and communicating email policies and procedures
- Education, changing behaviors through education and training
- Technology, for example, archiving, search facilities, and intelligent routing
Technology by itself is a blunt tool in addressing the email problem; there are a limited number of tools that allow intervention before the user is involved such as introducing filters to reduce spam. Technology led initiatives aimed at changing user behavior are unlikely to be successful unless they blend with methods of changing employee behavior.
We believe that successful change is dependent on introducing lean principles throughout the process. This means a focus on reducing wasteful activity and building feedback and data sharing into any program. Furthermore policies, standards and procedures for using email need to be developed and/or communicated successfully, supported by training and education programs that meet the needs of knowledge workers and the individual organization.
The second stage is to build an awareness and understanding of what the current cost of email is for the organization. This means taking a broad overview of all the separate activities that constitute ‘doing email' and auditing current behavior and the costs of that behavior. This considers both direct use costs and all the organizational resources that are consumed by users when they do email and making some estimate of the exposure to financial risk because of misuse of email. In addition an audit needs to be made of the resource costs that are consumed by providing, hosting and maintaining the email system.
The costs are time related in that they are the costs of the time consumed when email is produced, consumed, accessed, stored and retrieved. Although each action may only take a short amount of time when email is used extensively they quickly become considerable. These costs are exacerbated when the behaviors are inefficient or when the material contained in the email is suboptimal. There are also invisible and unappreciated costs such as ‘interrupt recovery time ' - the time taken to refocus on the task after an interruption to respond to or to access and read an email.
The resource costs relate to the provision of hardware (including storage costs), maintenance costs and the costs of providing IT support.
The risk associated costs are probabilistic in kind and are a calculation of the chances of legal cases being taken against the company and its likelihood of a successful defence.
All these costs can be built into a spreadsheet that will serve both as a baseline and a benchmark for cost reduction targets.
An organization considering an investment in email improvement should therefore follow the process outlined below with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound) targets.
