Michelle Rodger: Give us shelter from office email blizzard

Published on Sunday 11 December 2011 00:00

INFORMATION overload. It’s driving us crazy, affecting productivity and stifling our businesses. But we hunger for more, even while we fail to keep up with what we already have.

According to a recent survey, we waste two weeks a year searching for information we have previously read but forgotten or lost.

The average employee receives 36 emails a day (that’s not many, I hear you say) yet even that relatively small number is leaving some overwhelmed. This same average employee spends 21 minutes a day looking for a message or something they have lost.

Thestudy, commissioned by Mindjet and conducted by One Poll, revealed that almost two-thirds of office workers surveyed also said the amount of data they receive in the course of a day is negatively affecting their job.

Mo Costandi, a developmental neurobiologist and consultant, said that while the human brain was well adapted to processing information, it was the number of sources that people struggled with. He said: “Recently published research shows that multi-tasking places excessive demands on regions of the brain, so trying to process information from email, the internet, social networks and documents can be difficult to assimilate.”

Scientists tell us we need to hear a message three times before we can remember it. That’s three times, not 33 or 300 times. We are bombarded daily, hourly even, with sales messages, calls to action, telephone calls, emails, social media mentions, adverts, billboards, the list goes on.

Much of it is unnecessary for work and all of it is distracting, especially when it can take upwards of 25 minutes before an employee returns to their assigned tasks after viewing an email. It’s no wonder then that, according to the One Poll report, a third of all emails go unread.

It’s hard to imagine the cost of mismanaged information like that to your business. The One Poll guesstimates the figure at £1,240 a year. It might seem a small amount, but it’s only based on the average wage (if you have a lot of highly paid people that amount will soar) and it doesn’t take into account the effect on morale and productivity as people struggle to cope with information overload.

The company has now created a process – catchily christened the Data Mass Index Calculator – to help people assess how well they cope with the flood of information.

It takes the employee through a questionnaire, asks questions such as how many emails do you get a day and what percentage of those emails do you read? Then it decides how you are coping, offering advice relevant to where you are on the scale.

Chris Harman of Mindjet says the research has shown it doesn’t take much to feel like we’re drowning in data at work, and he warns: “The way we have to work today involves assimilating information from many sources and the fact we’re struggling is a very real business issue – one that will only increase as we enter the big data era.”

With so much information around us, how do we know the best means of communication for our audience?

Donald McLaughlin, director of Cisco Scotland & Ireland, says employers need to understand both the problem and also how best to engage with their employees.

“As well as managing the volume of messages, it’s important for employers to understand how their staff want to receive communication and converse with the organisation,” says McLaughlin. “Those under 30 are very comfortable with social media, and this represents a great opportunity to stimulate genuine two-way communication with this audience.”

It’s a constant challenge and one that’s not going to vanish any time soon. Instead, as more communication channels open up it’s going to become a daily, possibly hourly, challenge.

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brian.murray

Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 11:04 AM

I think the root of this problem lies in the fact that email became a business critical tool faster than anyone could recognise the importance of trainingequipping their staff with the ability to use the tool effectively ... from a personal perspective I believe it is still one of the most poorly used tool in any business. Obviously this provokes knee jerk reactions, most notably with Atos abandoning email. I believe that evolution of electronic communication will overtake this issue. As we see real-time messaging, social networks and multi-mediacollaboration solutions become far more wide-spread email will become a more focused tool. Obviously that is not to say that companies will learn the lessons of email. Many may still leave their employees poorly equipped to use these tools effectively, time will tell.

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Mark Dowe, Dumfries & Galloway

Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 07:56 AM

Not only has ‘information overload’ become problematic in the workplace, it is also encroaching on life in general. Those that learn to deal with it effectively will have a major advantage in the next few years. [ ] Essentially, Information Overload is when you are trying to deal with more information than you are able to process to make sensible decisions. The result is either that you delay making decisions, or that you make the wrong decisions – either is detrimental to the efficiency and productivity of the organisation. It is now commonplace to be getting too many emails, reports and incoming messages to deal with them effectively; the scarce resource of an employee’s time at work searching and looking for digital communications they had previously seen reduces the attention to detail an employee should be giving to his or her work. [ ] Although people talk about ‘living in the information age’ and all that entails, written information has been used for thousands of years: the invention of the Gutenberg Press just a few hundred years ago made it possible to distribute written information to large amounts of people. The advent of the modern computer, though, has given the ability to create, duplicate and access vast amounts of information that has created Information Overload amongst the general population. Quality of work can often be the first causality. [ ] The root of the problem is that, whilst computer processing and memory is increasing all the time, the humans that must use the information are not getting any faster. The human mind has become a limiting factor and acts as a bottleneck in the process. [ ] In the context of the subject it is perhaps worthwhile noting some of the causes given how Information Overload has become so commonplace. Whilst the widespread access to the Web and the ease of sending email messages to large numbers of people are common causes, poorly created information sources which are not simplified or filtered to make them shorter or those which are not written clearly so people have to spend more time understanding them adds to the problem. Those documents which contain factual errors or inconsistencies requiring further research and the fact that information can be duplicated for free (there is no variable cost in producing more copies) compounds Information Overload even further. [ ] Although there is no simple solution to the problem of Information Overload, there are some things that can be done to reduce the problem. For instance, spending less time on gaining information that is nice to know and more time on things that we need to know, would reduce the bulk of information we retain. Learning the art of how to create better information is also part of the solution; being direct in what is being asked of people often leads to short precise answers. And single-tasking (as opposed to multi-tasking) tends to keep the mind focused on one issue at a time.

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