If your employees were all taking two-hour lunches, wouldn’t you address it? The majority of businesses, worldwide, are suffering substantial productivity drains from a correctable source — an hour or more daily per worker — and most businesses don’t even know it.
In these trying economic times, we are all looking for opportunities to save costs and increase productivity. Businesses have a huge opportunity to increase productivity staring them in the face that unfortunately has gone virtually undetected.
What is that opportunity? The reclaimed productivity comes from changed e-mail habits. You think I kid? The research firm Basex recently estimated the cost of information overload to the world economy $900 billion annually. E-mail handling habits are among the top offenders.
Have you ever stopped to observe or consider what your organization’s e-mail culture is? How do your employees use e-mail? How do they manage it? How do they send it? How do they save it? The habits they adopt, whether they are positive or negative, can be contagious and suddenly your business has its own e-mail culture.
Habits? Contagious? When you consider how many impressions e-mail messages have all in each person in your organization daily, you can quickly understand how e-mail practices can become cultural and pervasive.
Here is just one example of how an e-mail culture can evolve. A boss realizes that he needs to call an urgent meeting with 3 of his managers. He sends an e-mail calling the meeting to start in the next 15 minutes. Two of the three see the e-mail and respond. The third, who was working on an important project, did not have his e-mail open, missed the meeting, and angered his boss.
Number three has just now learned that he can never turn his e-mail off for fear of missing an important e-mail. But it doesn’t stop here. It rolls downhill. The three managers have now been given “permission” to use e-mail as an URGENT delivery system. They use it in their departments, and very quickly, the entire organization is infected with this virus. No one can turn off his or her e-mail for fear of missing something vital. Employees become slaves to the “brinnng” or the flash of a newly arrived e-mail message and stop productive work anytime an e-mail comes in, even if it’s just spam.
And that’s just one example. Think of the practices of copying ten extra people, just so no one, even those only remotely interested in the topic, is missed. Or how about using e-mail as a chat room with multiple recipients to attempt dialogue? Or how about using e-mail to critique someone’s performance? One person does it, others do it. Culture is changed. Productivity is sapped. Your bottom-line is impacted negatively.
E-mail can be extremely costly if not used effectively. When you consider the average recovery time from any interruption is about 4 minutes, you can imagine the cost to your organization when people look up every time an e-mail is received. Do the math. If you stop what you’re doing every time you receive an e-mail and get (only) 30 e-mails in one day, that equals 120 minutes of recovery time—two hours of waste! And that doesn’t include the time spent handing the e-mail. Now multiply that by every employee, everyday, and you can see how productivity and profitability can seriously begin to drop.
The compound impact can be startling. Reclaiming one hour daily for a 20 person department enables a net productivity gain of 100 hours per week! Reclaiming even one half-hour daily per employee enables a net gain of 50 hours per week. In either case, at least one full headcount can be reclaimed — and that is for a small 20 person office.
While the remedies are simple to understand, they can be challenging to infuse because they require changing habits, and changing culture. But the returns can be huge. Here are some of the actions that can bring your organization the greatest returns.
Shift to checking e-mail infrequently. To instantly combat this loss of productivity, give everyone in your organization “permission” to turn off auto-receive, and to check e-mail only 5 times daily – upon arrival, mid morning, after lunch, mid-afternoon, and half hour before end of day. Or, have them schedule e-mail deliveries every 90 to 120 minutes. This practice changes the number of interruptions from continual to only five to eight daily, in essence shortening recovery time to only about 30 minutes daily– a saving of 90 minutes added right back to your bottom line. The less frequently people check their inboxes, the more productive they can be. This one change alone could account for an hour or more of reclaimed productivity per worker per day.
Disallow urgent e-mails. NEVER use e-mail urgently. If there is an urgent matter or you need a response in less than 3 hours, encourage every employee to pick up the phone or walk down the hall. And honor this practice yourself. One urgent e-mail from the boss will teach workers that they can not close down their e-mail and must check it constantly. This “learning” essentially reinstates the continual interruptions you are trying to conquer.
Pick up the phone. The more e-mails that are sent, the more e-mails an 
employee will receive. E-mail is intended to share information, not to dialogue. If every worker considers the boomerang effect of every e-mail he or she sends, fewer e-mails will be sent. Picking up the phone to have dialogue is still a very effective business practice.
If you can infuse just these three habit changes among all of your coworkers, you will see a notable improvement in productivity.
Sometimes it is not just cost saving. Rather, if you can reclaim the productivity that has been lost because of a near pandemic of productivity sapping e-mail habits throughout organizations, you’ll see it in your bottom line. Consider the impact of getting 10%-20% more out of each worker? Now THAT’S what will re-energize the economy.
More e-mail productivity strategies are in my book, Inbox Detox (Acanthus Publishing, 2009) available in paperback, Kindle, and auto-download.
