By Craig J. Cantoni
Capstone Consulting Group
Scottsdale, Arizona
(480) 661-8175
Fax 661-8155
E-mail Ccan2@aol.com

The average time wasted on worthless e-mail was 43 minutes per employee, per day.

Paradoxically, in spite of the high volume of e-mails in the studied company, an employee satisfaction survey indicated that communications were seen as below average in the organization.

Employees expressed a high degree of dissatisfaction with their work load and with not being able to do a quality job because of time pressures, yet they did not complain about spending almost an hour-and-a-half each day on e-mail.

Much of the unnecessary e-mail was in the form of supervisors following up on projects and assignments, and of employees keeping their supervisors informed of seemingly trivial matters.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, e-mail does not diminish bureaucracy and allow employees to circumvent the chain-of-command.

It is considerably more efficient in many cases to use voice-mail or old-fashioned telephone conversations for longer messages requiring no written record and containing no complex information.

E-mail vs. Worker Productivity

This study was recently covered by nationally syndicated columnist Dale Dauten in his "Corporate Curmudgeon" column, which is distributed by King Features to major newspapers across the United States.

Background and Methodology

The study was part of a larger productivity and job satisfaction analysis conducted in a multi-billion-dollar high-tech company, which, because of consultant principles and the need to protect confidential proprietary information, must be kept anonymous.

A similar study was conducted in another large high-tech company, resulting in similar findings. The findings cannot be extrapolated to smaller companies or to other industries with any degree of reliability, since the high-tech industry and larger companies are typically the heaviest users of e-mail. There is ample anecdotal evidence from other productivity projects, however, that even non-high-tech companies and smaller companies are misusing e-mail to the detriment of white-collar productivity.

The study did not analyze the use of voice-mail, since the company in question used e-mail more extensively than voice-mail. It is recognized that the usage pattern is reversed in some companies.

Two methods were used to collect data. One method was to ask salaried (exempt) employees to log the time spent per day reading and responding to non-personal e-mail that, in their opinion, had no discernible value; namely, e-mail that did not help them do their jobs, did not help others do their jobs, did not provide valuable information to decision makers up and down the chain-of-command, or did not aid in providing better service to internal and external customers. The second method was to conduct a desk audit of the e-mail crossing selected salaried employees' computers. The audit was done with the permission and assistance of the employees.

There was no statistically significant difference between the results of the two methods. In other words, the logs of employees closely matched the audit results.

Findings

The average time wasted on worthless e-mail was 43 minutes per employee, per day, including time spent outside of the office doing e-mail. For a company with close to 2,000 salaried employees, that equated to 299,280 hours over a year, or 37,410 person-days of work. Stated differently, the wasted time was equal to 155 employees doing nothing of value for an entire year. Based on a fully-loaded cost for the average salaried employee in the company of $53,000, the total annual cost of the lost productivity was $8.2 million. That degree of hemmorhaging would be stopped immediately if it was occuring on the plant floor with blue-collar workers, but many companies do not even measure the productivity of salaried employees.

Paradoxically, in spite of the high volume of e-mails in the studied company, an employee satisfaction survey indicated that communications were seen as below average in the organization. Clearly, the cliche´ about communications is true: quantity does not equal quality.

Also paradoxically, the employees expressed a high degree of dissatisfaction with their work load and with not being able to do a quality job because of time pressures, yet they did not complain about spending almost an hour-and-a-half each day on e-mail. In other words, they did not make a connection between time wasted on e-mail and their inability to get their work done. In fact, it was common for employees to brag to each other about the number of e-mails received each day, as if a high volume of e-mail was a sign of importance and indispensability -- of being "in the loop." (It was not unusual for employees to get over 100 e-mails a day, excluding the e-mails appearing on general electronic bulletin boards.)

Interestingly, much of the unnecessary e-mail was in the form of supervisors following up on projects and assignments, and of employees keeping their supervisors informed of seemingly trivial matters, often for political "CYA" reasons. Not surprisingly, the satisfaction survey revealed that too little freedom to act and too much supervision and second guessing from above were the biggest demotivators in the company.

Conclusions

On a macro level, the findings may offer one reason why other studies have shown that the nation's white-collar productivity has not going up appreciably with increased investments in computer technology. At the level of the individual firm, the findings suggest that:

• E-mail can be addictive and can lull even the best people into thinking that responding to unimportant e-mail is the real work of the organization. Their managers inadvertently set the tone in that regard by overusing e-mail.
• E-mail can be a "weapon of mass demotivation" in the hands of overcontrolling and unapproachable managers, for e-mail makes it too easy to bombard employees from afar with nitpicky and impersonal messages.
• Contrary to the conventional wisdom, e-mail does not diminish bureaucracy and allow employees to circumvent the chain-of-command. If bureaucracy and hierarchy existed before e-mail, they will exist after e-mail, perhaps to an even greater degree.
• E-mail's major strength of transmitting written messages over long distances at the speed of electricity is also its major weakness. Speed and distance often get in the way of the extra time and face-to-face communications needed to build trust, teamwork, openness and honesty within organizations.

To a large extent, e-mail is like a world-class sprinter wearing concrete running shoes. The concrete shoe in this metaphor is the computer keyboard. Other than Morse Code or smoke signals, there is probably no slower or labor-intensive way of composing messages than by typing them one letter at a time. It is considerably more efficient in many cases to use voice-mail or old-fashioned telephone conversations for longer messages requiring no written record and containing no complex information.

Recommendations

Listed below are suggestions for making e-mail more efficient and effective:

• Use process improvement and total quality management techniques and principles in any e-mail improvement effort.
• Set improvement goals and measure progress.
• Get cross-functional and multi-disciplinary teams involved in the effort.
• Fix the underlying root causes, which may include bureaucracy, hierarchy, autocratic management, and a lack of overall goals and measurements for salaried employees.
• Find ways other than e-mail for employees to fulfill their emotional needs to feel important, indispensable and in the loop.
• Ask employees two questions:
  1. "What information are you getting that you don't need?"
  2. "What information do you need that you are not getting?"
  Then, stop the former and provide the latter.
• Make it a cultural norm for employees to give each other feedback on e-mail that they do not find valuable.
• Do not issue policies and rules on the proper use of e-mail, as some companies have done. That does not fix the root causes and it treats people like children, thus triggering rebellious behavior.

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