The following is an article I contributed to Forbes. E-mail overload is the
leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today.
Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion
annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And
the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person
per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010. The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is
largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to
solve it. A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes.
When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this
causes exceptions. For example, when a customer requests information
that isn't provided by a standard support process, it can kick off a
chain of e-mails hunting for information--and what is found isn't
easily captured into the redesign of the process. We haven't had good tools and practices for resolving these exceptions and learning from them. In The Only Sustainable Edge,
John Seely Brown and John Hagel identify that most employee time is not
spent executing process, but handling exceptions to process. Commercial e-mail spam filters and virus protection do a reasonable
job today. What remains is behavioral--not how e-mail works, but how we
work with it and how we shouldn't. According to Gartner Group, 30% of
e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and
Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext customers commonly
decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative
workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many
communication. From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a push
medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox
at near zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 media emphasize pull
technology: You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull
information to you when you want it and unsubscribe when you want.
Ideally, we would use push mediums for directed private or
time-sensitive communication and pull for less formal, more public and
less urgent communication. Now there is a choice--so long as you can
gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it. Eugene Kim says there is "no such thing as
collaboration without a shared goal." For every group that you
regularly communicate with, one of your goals should be to increase
communications efficiency and effectiveness. Without these shared goals
and practices, behavior will not change. And with new technologies, you
have the opportunity to transform communication habits into
collaborative best practices. Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool:
Establish Internal E-Mail Practices
Within your organization or community, review your current e-mail
habits. Consider establishing agreements on the formality, tone,
brevity, distribution, responsiveness and timing. Then try bold
experiments such as "E-mail-Free Fridays"--not necessarily because they
will work, but for learning what could work and raising awareness of
the cost of e-mail. Other peers might help bring awareness to work/life
balance issues when always on mobile e-mail.
Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces
With enterprise social software solutions available on the market
today, identify group uses of e-mail and move them to private
workspaces. This creates a spam- and noise-free environment for the
team. Different workspaces with different features can accomplish
different goals. For example, create one where your team can hold less
formal, blog-style conversations and general context sharing. Google
(nasdaq:
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employees blog weekly in lieu of more formal reporting to make
employees' work searchable. Or create more structured project
workspaces with a process for archiving them at the end of the project.
Establish Public Protocols When Possible
For communicating with the outside world, establish protocols such
as preferred methods of contact. As you communicate, be clear about how
private or redistributable an e-mail is. For example, I include this
line in my signature: This e-mail is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private
Reply to E-mail by Blog
Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls once described
blogging as "replying to my e-mails in public." Of course, you can't do
that with every e-mail you get. But for the ones you can, you decrease
the odds of answering the same question again and make your ideas
discoverable. And while not everyone will blog, there are other public
ways to share when appropriate.
Leverage Special-Purpose Social Software
Luis Suarez of IBM
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with social software. It's not just about reducing e-mail, but using
Web sites to help you communicate efficiently and effectively. For
example, LinkedIn
is a better tool for referring new contacts. Dopplr is great for
sharing travel plans. Flickr for sharing photos. Delicious for links. As with private workspaces, these Web sites might create separate
inboxes for you to manage. Ironically, for those who don't use advanced
tools such as dashboards and newsreaders, the e-mail inbox becomes a
place that notifies you about communications in other places. And that
lets e-mail stick to what it does best.
Ross Mayfield is chairman, president and co-founder of Socialtext, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based social software company.
