Trying new things

Cartoons Archive Copyright, Grantland Enterprises. May not be reproduced.

 

Copyright, Grantland Enterprises. May not be reproduced.

It turns out that it’s in the best interest of organizations to ensure the happiness of employees. Happier employees are more successful in numerous domains such as motivation, longevity at a workplace, self-efficacy and health.

Fortunately, increasing happiness at the workplace isn’t a secret.

According to Pryce-Jones, happiness at work has five major components, referred to as the 5Cs:

1. Contribution: What a person does in the workplace and their view of it. This relates to a feeling of pride in our efforts to be effective and provide value. Having clear goals and achieving them can aid in this component.

2. Conviction: A person’s ability to stay motivated. This relates to how someone responds to adversity and whether they can remain positive and focused toward the mission of the corporation.

3. Culture: How well a person fits within the ethos and dynamic of the workplace. We all have different personalities and we want to consider how well we fit within the culture of our organization. Do you desire autonomy, or reliance on others? Do you enjoy change and variety, or a fixed system and processes?

The value of this Business Plan process is the thinking that it forces you to do about your business, your products and services, your goals and the actions you’ll take to achieve your goals. Even if no one but you ever sees the plan, you will have given purposeful and logical thought to the purpose and direction of your business. This process helps ensure that the many activities you squeeze into your limited hours are time well spent – focused on moving your business forward in an aggressive yet realistic way.

Part 1: Analysis

Core Services

• List the core services (or products) you offer
• Be as specific as possible, but put similar items in a group (e.g., “Editorial Services” includes writing, editing, etc.)

Target Markets

• List the market segments you serve
• Be realistic; if you realistically cannot serve large corporations, for example, then don’t include them
• Be as specific as possible, but put similar items in a group unless there is a compelling reason to list them separately (e.g., “School Groups” could include secondary schools and colleges, but these segments might have different needs)

Competition Analysis

• List your competitors and a brief description of them
• Unless a specific competitor presents unique challenges to your business, it is OK to list them in groups (e.g., “Independent Practitioners” or “Small Agencies”)
• The purpose is to provide yourself a picture of what your business is up against as you market your core service

Vision and Mission Statements

• It is useful to have Vision and Mission statements that keep you focused on what is important to you
• Vision Statement should describe the “ideal state” of your business; it should be achievable, but also something to strive for
• Mission Statement succinctly states what your business is about, its purpose, the role it plays in the market

Part 2: Assumptions

Business Principles

• It is useful to develop a set of Business Principles that guide how you will conduct your business
• These principles have a direct bearing on your relationships with customers and clients
• The reason to include it under “Assumptions” is because your Business Principles are conditions under which your business operates; as you will see further in this section, you will list other conditions under which your business operates as well

Economic Assumptions

• List things you know about the economy (local, state, regional, national, international – whatever you believe affects your business)
• Include relevant historical facts (e.g., “the U.S. economy fell into recession in 2001”) and how they affect your ability to do business
• Note the impact of past, current, or anticipated economic conditions on your business and the products/services you provide

Financial Assumptions

• List things you know about your personal and/or business financial situation that affect your ability to do business and to grow your business
• Include things like cash flow issues, savings programs, the financial picture as a result of actions or conditions (a recession, recent investments, loan approvals, etc.)
• Reflect financial “realities” about your business (e.g., the need to control expenses, taxes owed, upcoming capital expenditures, expanding payroll, etc.)

Technological Assumptions

• Since so many businesses – large and small – depend on technology (web, e-mail, phone, etc.) today, it is useful to think about how these issues affect your business’s ability to succeed
• Think about upgrades of hardware and software, the impact of growth and expansion on your technological needs, training that will be necessary, etc.

Part 3: Strategic Summary

SWOT Analysis

• List all the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats about your business
• Be honest with yourself; don’t hold anything back or ignore realities

Key Success Factors

• Out of your SWOT Analysis, what are the key factors that will affect the ability of your business to succeed?
• Examples: strong reputation, broad client base, repeat business, unique provider, etc.

Competitive Advantages / Disadvantages

• Create lists of your competitive advantages and disadvantages based on your analysis of everything else up to this point
• What unique advantages does your business have in the marketplace?
• What distinct disadvantages does your business have?
• Be honest and don’t hold back because you will develop strategies based largely on this informatio

Strategic Goals

• Develop two or three broad Strategic Goals for your business in the next year or the next 3-5 years, depending on the scope of your plan
• Strategic Goals should be “big picture” goals, but they should also be specific enough that you can measure them
• Under each goal, list one to three specific, measurable components
• Example of a Strategic Goal: “Grow Client Base”
• Example of specific, measurable component: “Add at least X new clients by X date”
• Make your goals SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-driven

Tactical Actions

• Out of your Strategic Goals, list specific actions you will take that will help you achieve them
• Examples: Meet with two new prospective clients per month; Join a professional association to expand my network
• Create a calendar that plots when each tactical activity will occur so you don’t forget to do them

Robert Holland

By now, most of you know that I’m a super-early riser. If you do some homework on the subject, you’ll find that many successful CEOs are, as well. It’s simply ingrained into us – If we want to be successful, we need to be working when others are not. It’s like the classic running quote:

“Somewhere, right now, someone is training while you are not. When you race him, he will win.”

So I get up early because I believe it’s worth it. Here’s some of the benefits you can get from doing it, and as a bonus, here’s how to actually do it!

Top ten reasons to get up early every day:

10) Learn! You can browse seven websites in a row (news, news, gossip, financial, gossip, sports, weather) without being interrupted by one email. You’re now smarter for your entire day.

9) This early, it really IS all about you. You get a few minutes of pure “you” time. For me, it’s waking up and making coffee. While I’m doing that, I can pet Karma and NASA, and not in just a “scratch behind the ears once because I’m late” way. I can sit with them as I drink my first cup of coffee and enjoy the calming effect that a pet has on you. I have no doubt this helps to set my mood for the day.

8) We’re not as big as we think we are. I can watch the sunrise. We take certain things for granted. Light, air, clouds, etc. Get up one morning and actually watch the sky turn from dark to light. It’s amazing. It changes your entire perspective from how big we are to how small we are when you realize that we’re nothing in the universe, just starstuff on a much, much bigger plane. That affects how you think, and changes for the better how you look at things.

7) You’re automatically early. Getting up even a half hour early eliminates the “rush” that comes with leaving the house in the morning. Get up earlier, and you’re calmer. You remember everything you need to take. You walk out without being stressed. This leads to a calmer day. Also, studies have shown that being on time is one thing that good leaders master, as well as demand. Want to be on time? Get up earlier.

Recently, I was waiting for a meeting to begin at a 500-person professional services firm.  An item on the bulletin board caught my eye.  It was a memo from the CFO.  If everyone in the firm could spend an hour less per day managing email, he said, it would make a difference of $2 million a year to the company.

I don’t know how he arrived at that number (and I believe it’s quite conservative), but I have to give him credit – not many companies would publish a number like that.  In fact, I haven’t seen many companies that have even tried to figure it out.

This may seem like a problem for HR or IT – but I believe it falls squarely in communications territory.  It’s our responsibility to help our employers and clients understand how clogged communications channels are costing very real dollars – just like rush hour on the Long Island Expressway wastes untold gallons of increasingly precious gasoline.

Let’s take a look at four aspects of infoglut that reduce the “MPG” of our communications:

Lost productivity – What does an hour of employee time cost?  In U.S. knowledge organizations, it can easily average $50 including benefits – more if you add in everything it takes to support an employee.

In a 1,000-person organization, if you can eliminate five minutes of wasted time, you’ve saved $4,167.  Do that every weekday for a year, and you’ve freed up more than $1 million worth of productivity.  Make it 10 minutes a day, and you’ve saved $2 million plus.  (That’s why I think the CFO’s estimate above is on the low side.)

What  gobbles up all that time with no benefit to the company?  The mechanics of email, for starters.  Sorting through the hundreds of messages in your in-box.  Deleting messages you never should have received (cc’s and distribution lists are big culprits here).  Filing messages you might need someday.  Frantically nuking emails – or dragging them into folders – so the “send” button will work once again. 

The problem isn’t just time spent on low-value activities.  Interrupting employees is costly.  Research shows that every time an employee must refocus his or her attention, it takes time and energy to mentally switch from Topic A to Topic B and back again.

In 2000, Pitney Bowes teamed up with the Institute for the Future to measure the number of messages employees receive daily.  In Fortune 1000 companies that number was 168 – via phone, email, voicemail, postal mail, interoffice mail, fax and cell phone.  That was five years ago; today you’d need to significantly up the email count, and add in instant messaging, SMS, RSS and other new ways to contact employees.

Time spent finding information – Beyond the time spent processing the high volume of messages lies another problem.  Employees spend a huge amount of their time looking for information they can’t find – or recreating information that already exists.

IDC wrote about this for KM World magazine last year.  The numbers they cite are mind-boggling:

“Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists.”

Using a hypothetical company that employed 1,000 knowledge workers who earn an average salary plus benefits of $80,000 a year, IDC calculated that:

“The time spent looking for and not finding information costs our mythical organization a total of $6 million a year. That doesn’t include opportunity costs or the costs of reworking information that exists but can’t be located.

“The cost of reworking information because it hasn’t been found costs that organization a further $12 million a year (15% of time spent in duplicating existing information).

“Not locating and retrieving information has an opportunity cost of more than $15 million annually. Accelerating the introduction of a blockbuster drug or delaying its demotion to generic status by just one day through use of information access software could mean $8.5 million or more each day.”

Diminished quality of thought – IDC points out that there are other factors that are just as real – but impossible to measure.  For instance, how much would an organization gain if its employees could spend more time thinking about the business and less time searching for information?  How much better would their decisions be if they really understood their company’s direction – and the marketplace forces that shape it?

There’s also new evidence linking info-bombardment with decreased ability to think.  Hewlett Packard recently teamed up with the University of London to study the impact of constant information barrage on intelligence.  Here’s how HP describes the results: 

“In a series of tests carried out by Dr. Glenn Wilson, Reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, an average worker’s functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming emails. This drop in IQ is more than double the four point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana.”

The Guardian summarizes the study more colorfully:

“Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached ‘startling’ levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

“Respondents’ minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an email dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night’s sleep.

“’This is a very real and widespread phenomenon,’ said Glenn Wilson, a psychologist from King’s College, London University, who carried out 80 clinical trials for TNS research, commissioned by the IT firm Hewlett Packard. The average IQ loss was measured at 10 points, more than double the four point mean fall found in studies of cannabis users.

“The most damage was done, according to the survey, by the almost complete lack of discipline in handling emails. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues found a compulsion to reply to each new message, leading to constant changes of direction which inevitably tired and slowed down the brain.”

HP is discouraging “always-on” communications in its own company, and has created a downloadable “Guide to Avoiding Info-Mania” to help others.

The human costs – I recently flew from the Midwest to Seattle.  My seatmate was a recruiter for a high-tech corporation.  And she was under such stress that she was about ready to resign.

“I spend my life dealing with email,” she said.  “I shouldn’t even take the time to talk with you.”

But talk she did.  The flow of email was relentless, she said.  On a “quiet afternoon,” more than 200 messages dropped into her in-box, all clamoring for her attention.  She spent much of the flight trying to cope with the latest deluge – knowing that more awaited her when she landed.

“I’m usually a positive person,” she said. “I don’t like what this job has done to me. It’s a job I wanted, but I may need to leave it so I can get back to who I am.”

Stressed-out employees like my seatmate are not likely to contribute the creativity, innovation, imagination and energy their organizations need to compete.  Stress costs industry over $300 billion a year in the United States, over $16 billion a year in Canada, and as much as £7.3 billion in the United Kingdom, says Ravi Tangri, founder of Chrysalis Performance Technologies.

In his book Stress Costs, Stress-Cures, Tangri says stress is responsible for 19 percent of absenteeism, 40 percent of turnover, 55 percent of employee-assistance program costs – and much more.

To what extent does information overload directly fuel stress?  In the short term, probably not as much as, say, widespread layoffs.  But, longer term, the unrelenting feeling that you can’t keep up with the demands for your attention and mindpower can take a heavy toll – and doubtless contributes to the high cost of stress.

So how do we reduce stress, curtail interruptions, make information more accessible and free up productivity?  There’s much more we can do – from helping people better manage incoming messages to changing the behavior of senders to applying alternative technologies. 

Communicators need to give this their urgent attention.  But until we prove to executives that information overload is a problem that is costing them hard dollars (or pounds, euros, rupees or yen), it’s unlikely we’ll get the resources to tackle it in any meaningful way.

Bill Boyd

Admit it: A number of us complain about the meetings we have to attend. However, there must be a memory, distant though it might be, of a meeting you participated in that had the key people in the room, went by quickly and actually produced a result.

Here are some questions to ask to have the right kind of meeting:

Question #1: Is a meeting the “right” thing to do?

One of the ways to figure out the answer to that question is to make sure you understand the purpose of pulling people together. A meeting can often achieve better communication around a topic, which in turn can lead to better decision-making. A meeting, especially those at which most of the people are physically present, allows greater transparency, since all the key communication components are present: words, tone and body language. Even though we often rue the time spent in meetings, a well-run meeting with the right players present can actually be less time-consuming than following, and then interpreting, the multiple threaded emails discussing the same topic. Which leads me to Question #2.

Question #2: Are the right people here?

You want people in the room who have either or both of two attributes, specifically: the knowledge to inform and move the discussion forward, or the ability — that is, the authority — to make a decision. If the person can’t be either a key contributor or a decision-maker, he or she does not belong in the meeting. A key contributor might be someone from another area of the business who will bring a different perspective to the conversation and therefore enhance the overall thought process — and ultimately the decision-making.

Question #3: Is it the right time for a meeting?

This is not about people’s individual circadian clock, although, in today’s global economy, being aware of who might be dialed in when they ideally would be sleeping is a consideration. What I’m referring to is whether, at this particular time in a project or in a process, a meeting is the right action or intervention. Updates are often better done in a succinctly written document. Trouble-shooting an obstacle can usually be accomplished in a one-on-one conversation with two or multiple players.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t? The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent. But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour. I know this from my own experience. I get two to three times as much writing accomplished when I focus without interruption for a designated period of time and then take a real break, away from my desk. The best way for an organization to fuel higher productivity and more innovative thinking is to strongly encourage finite periods of absorbed focus, as well as shorter periods of real renewal. Read full article via blogs.hbr.org

Part II: Eight ways to combat e-mail overload for yourself and your organization: A do-it-yourself kit.

 

By Bill Boyd, ABC

Communications Integrator + Principal, Outsource Marketing

 

5. Templates save writing and reading time

 

There are two types of templates to consider (the two could also be combined):

 

Employee e-mail templates. These are predetermined e-mail formats intended to ensure that information gets to appropriate audiences quickly and efficiently. The template could include “Intended audience,” “What this message covers,” “Action expected,” the message itself, and “For more information.” The idea is to compel managers to provide some logical structure to the e-mails they write – and to think through the intended outcome before they hit “send.”

Bill Jensen suggests that anything worth reading must fit in the top 3” x 5”. It’s the most common size people use for their message window, he says. It also creates a balance between a space designed for fast scanning and the most message before needing to scroll. Jensen says e-mail messages should use the CLEAR model. Readers are looking for:

 

Connected – to their current projects and workload

List next steps – What you want them to do after reading your e-mail

Expectations – What success looks like

Ability – How they’ll get things done (tools and support)

Return – Their WIIFM

 

Quick Templates. The other type of template is created by Outlook add-ins. The idea here is to enable you to store paragraphs, sentences or phrases that you can instantly “plug in” to an e-mail you want to send. The templates enable you to reuse the copy you’ve written for any previous e-mail—or create “boilerplate” that you can call up at any time. One of the better add-ins is “Quick Templates” from MapiLab: http://www.mapilab.com/outlook/quick_templates/

 

 

Take advantage of alternative technologies

 

6. Collaboration space can replace some e-mails

 

The amount of e-mail devoted to collaboration varies by company, but in many organizations—ones that have no other technological solution—the percentage is huge. Questions are asked and answered, volunteers sought, project updates provided, meetings scheduled, agendas and minutes shared, and countless other exchanges initiated. Many of which could be accomplished just as efficiently—and without clogging anyone’s in box —by using SharePoint, eRoom, a wiki, or another collaboration mechanism.

The problem is, IT departments often don’t provide those solutions. At the same time, companies don’t want groups of engineers (for instance) setting up communities on Yahoo! Where company policy allows, secure hosted off-site wikis—such as SocialText.com and JotSpot.com—work well for project teams that need to keep information private.

In the absence of company-approved mechanisms, what often happens is that someone with a few resources and a little know-how sets up SharePoint on a desktop computer or a borrowed server—giving his or her work group at least a primitive way to collaborate inside the firewall.

 

7. Blogs and RSS can eliminate more e-mails

 

For routine one-way communication—say, an HR department that needs to communicate job postings—blogs and RSS can be an ideal way to move substantial amounts of traffic out of e-mail. Using blogging software to post operational data has two big advantages:

 

• It creates a permanent record of the topics being communicated. It’s been said, “e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.” That’s certainly true if the information isn’t posted somewhere permanent.
• It’s easy to use (which is why blogging has become so popular on the Internet in general).
• It can be syndicated via RSS, which enables a “news reader” on the desktop to display the latest communications around a given topic. (The topics can be organized by “channel,” and people can subscribe to a given channel or not.)

 

Employees need to understand that operational blogs are not for posting the sort of opinions they might share after hours via Blogspot or Typepad. This kind of blog is all business—and consists primarily of messages that previously would have been shared via e-mail.

 

8. Make employees subscribe to e-mail communications

 

Listservs been around for years. They were popular even before the Web. How many companies, however, use them to manage their internal distribution lists? Instead, lists are often created and maintained by admins, who do their best to add and delete names as people come and go in the organization.

Why not publish a catalog of the available distribution lists and let people subscribe—or not—as they find value in the information? (Or at least give them the “unsubscribe” option.) Two horrible things might happen:

 

• Employees might subscribe to lists involving groups they don’t “belong” to. If the information is really sensitive, then don’t allow this. If it’s not, rejoice that some employees care enough to monitor what’s going on in areas where they might make an unexpected contribution.
• They might not subscribe to information they should be reading. Well, don’t let them opt out of e-mails from the CEO or the must-shove-it-out-there stuff from HR and Legal. Apart from that, though, why force anything on employees? If they’re just going to nuke it anyway, why suck up the IT resources and employee time necessary to send it to people who will just delete it (and then have to delete it again to free up server space)?

 

If employees aren’t reading information the company needs them to know, the answer isn’t to dump it wholesale into their in-box. It’s to deal with the issue at performance review time—or sooner. Smart employees will soon learn which distribution lists they need to be on, and which they don’t.

Bill Boyd

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management (JECM) magazine, published by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. (http://www.ragan.com). It is shared with members of the Communitelligence portal with the kind permission of JECM’s editor, David R. Murray. 

 – Part II of Taming the e-mail elephant

Serious reductions in e-mail overload will require three things: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies. Here are eight ways to combat e-mail overload for yourself and your organization: A do-it-yourself kit.

By Bill Boyd, ABC

Communications Integrator + Principal, Outsource Marketing

 

You’ve no doubt seen them tromping through the halls of your company, or at least hiding in the corner of the room. Elephants. These elephants have two characteristics: They’re something big that your organization knows is there and finds impossible to ignore. They’re also something no one talks about—because nobody knows what to do about them.

Some companies have lots of elephants; others have fairly few. But there’s one elephant that resides in nearly every organization (and that communicators should be helping to hunt down)—e-mail overload.

Why is e-mail overload an elephant? For one thing, the costs are huge. A couple of years ago, the CFO of a professional services firm shared a startling factoid with his organization. If everyone spent an hour a day less managing e-mail, it would add $2 million a year to the bottom line. And that’s for just 500 people!

That amount strikes me as quite conservative: By my calculations, if you work in a 500-person organization where employees average $50 an hour, you can free up $2 million in productivity in a year by eliminating just 20 minutes of wasted time per day. Consider the amount of time employees spend simply handling (or mishandling) the mechanics of e-mail, and 20 minutes a day seems like an easy target.

Too much e-mail can bury vital information. According to IDC, knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out new information. Why can’t they locate the existing stuff? My theory: A lot of it was shared via e-mail. Then it got deleted to make room for more messages, or buried in folders with subject lines that didn’t do the job. IDC says chasing existing info can cost untold millions in a single knowledge company.

How about your IQ? What’s that worth to your company? Research by Hewlett Packard and the University of London shows that the IQ of an average employee falls 10 points when interrupted repeatedly by incoming e-mail – more than twice the four-point drop experienced by marijuana smokers. HP is striving to reduce “always on” communications among its own employees, and has created a “Guide to Info Mania” to help others.

Most organizations, however, aren’t sure what to do about the e-mail elephant. There’s no shortage of software, books, courses and other tools to help tackle the problem. The challenge—as countless communicators have discovered—is that no one offers an off-the-shelf solution that will address e-mail overload comprehensively.

So we have assembled a toolbox for you that will enable to you combat information overload on three fronts within your organization: Better tools for in-box management, changing sender behavior, and alternative technologies.

Try any or all of them and see what they do for your organization. Just as important, please let us know which ideas worked well for you—and which didn’t.

 

 

Use tools for in-box management

 

1. A good system—including self-discipline

 

There are many places you can turn for advice on how to deal with the 2,785 e-mails awaiting your attention. Which system you choose is not nearly as important as having a system of some kind.

Productivity consultant and executive coach Sally McGhee teaches courses on the Microsoft campus on how to get the most from Outlook. You may want to consider something similar for your organization.

Like many e-mail gurus, McGhee prefers an empty inbox. She recommends that you start at the top, tackling e-mails one at a time, and do one of four things with each:

 

• Delete it—you can do this with about half your e-mail
• Do it—if you can accomplish that in two minutes or less
• Delegate it—this should take no more than two minutes
• Defer it—this should be about 10 percent of your e-mail

 

McGhee says power e-mail processors can go through about 100 messages an hour. She also recommends you build a simple e-mail reference system. Read McGhee’s article at http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/manageinfo/e-mail.mspx

Consultant Bill Jensen, author of several books on simplifying communications, advises you to delete 75 percent of your e-mails. “They bring the noisy, unfiltered, unfocused, and undesired world to you!” he says. “You need to get disciplined about closing your virtual door.”

In The Simplicity Survival Handbook, Jensen says the first step in eliminating most of the noise coming at us is admitting that we own part of the problem. Advises Jensen: “If BOTH the Subject and the Sender fail to create this reaction ­– I have to read or at least scan this today – DO NOT open or scan the message. Hit Delete immediately.”

Then, he says, scan the remaining e-mails for two bits of information: Action you must take, and date or deadline for that action. “If the messages do not contain an action and a short-term date, delete them.”

Other e-mail experts advise you to touch every message only once. The success of any system will depend on balance – the balance between dealing with e-mail regularly enough to keep it under control, but not so often that you “live” in your inbox.

 

2. Teach employees to use more descriptive subject lines

 

When it comes to being able to handle e-mail, better subject lines are one of the most promising “quick hits” available. Sally McGhee advises her clients to include three elements: An objective or project name (which lets you know what the e-mail relates to), a requested action, and a due date. “Taking the time to create clear subject lines makes e-mail communication more effective and increases the chance that your e-mail will be responded to,” says McGhee.

Another little-considered subject line is the one attached to meeting requests. Instead of “SETI Project meeting,” how about “SETI Project: Responding to e-mail from aliens”?

You might also include one other category of useful info – who’s supposed to attend.  Unfortunately, Microsoft Outlook’s calendar entries include where a meeting will take place, but not who’s invited.  Add Your name, Invitee 1, and Invitee 2 to the subject line – and you’ve undoubtedly saved time for all three people.  (No, this won’t work with 10 people – but how many of your meetings include 10 people?) 

 

3. Create a priortization code for subject lines

 

There’s yet another element to subject lines that—if widely used—could help everyone filter their messages more effectively. One of the problems with e-mails is that they seldom clearly indicate what you’re supposed to do with them.

“Imagine,” says McGhee, “if you could sort your Subject lines by action – Action Requested (AR), Response Requested (RR), and Read Only (RO) – or if you could sort them by objectives or due dates.”

I believe this system would work even better with unique four-letter indicators (I call them “O-Marks,” for Outlook):

 

URGT:        Urgent – respond or act ASAP

ACTN:       Action required

RSPN:        Response requested

UN2K:       You need to know

FYIN:         Read at your convenience

 

Other categories could include:

 

MTNG:       Pre- or post-meeting communication

BUSN:        Strategic business information

EMPY:       Information for employees – benefits, job postings, HR

TRNG:        Training-related communications

 

And, for your team or department, make up your own. Create O-Marks for projects, team updates, whatever your particular group is working on. Adding O-Marks at the front of your subject line can make e-mails – at least from your teammates – easier to process quickly. Just sort your in-box alphabetically to group like categories – or send each type of e-mail to its own folder.

  

Change sender behavior

 

4. Write some corporate e-mail rules

 

Most companies have rules—ranging from a few guidelines to thick manuals – on how to use the Web. Almost no one has rules surrounding e-mail (apart from the usual boilerplate about how We The Company can read every word of it – and if you violate one of the 50 rules, you’re history).

Why shouldn’t the rules include how to use e-mail effectively? E-mail is a business tool, and companies have the right to decide how it will be used to conduct business. That could mean, for instance, limitations on use of the “cc” line. Companies are very quick to identify the cost of producing communications – but they too seldom calculate the cost of consuming them. A low-value e-mail sent to 20 top managers can be very expensive, indeed.

The rules might evolve into a comprehensive guide to how to use all the company’s electronic channels. Technology consultant Shel Holtz says too often, the launch of technology is left to IT:

“Most IT departments do a great job at what they’re supposed to do: get the technology working. It’s not—and shouldn’t be—IT’s job to establish policies for the use of technologies, to market the tool, or to drive a cultural change around how the tool should be used in a business context. Whenever IT is the only department involved in the launch of a new technology, technology is all employees get. ‘Here you go everybody. We’ve installed e-mail for you. Godspeed.’

“As a result, employees figure out how to use the technology based on personal preferences rather than a companywide imperative.” Holtz envisions a joint effort between HR and Employee Communications – which he calls “Message Mission Control” – to set and communicate policies on the use of all messaging channels, from interoffice mail to SMS.

Holtz says this effort must include promoting behavior change through rewards and recognition. “Part of the culture change,” he says, “is knowing when NOT to use e-mail, but rather the phone, fax, IM, face-to-face or other channels.”
This article originally appeared in the May/June 2006 issue of the Journal of Employee Communication Management (JECM) magazine, published by Lawrence Ragan Communications, Inc. (http://www.ragan.com). It is shared with members of the Communitelligence portal with the kind permission of JECM’s editor, David R. Murray.

Bill Boyd

For years, I scoffed at the idea of “information overload.” I kept up with MY emails, read several books a year, and felt perfectly able to stay on top of my calendar. I wrote articles for publications, spoke at conferences, entered awards competitions, and stayed in touch with colleagues around the world.

Sure, there was a “guilt pile” on my bed table, my filing cabinet needed attention, and the family photo albums hadn’t been updated since 1990 (still haven’t) – but information overload? No way.

Today? Way. The guilt pile has expanded to my hard drive, which now contains untold megabytes of stuff I’ll never read. (But would like to. Really.) Emails go unanswered for days if not weeks. I missed my most recent tax deadline. And it took me a year – yes, a year – to get this site started.

Some of that comes from building a business, some from doing lots of client work. But I’m no longer raising children (a huge consumer of time when done right), and I’m no busier than lots of people I know.

So what’s sucking up our time?

Recently, I spoke with the VP for internal communications of a nationwide health-care provider. I asked how concerned she was about “information overload.” She said what her people were experiencing was less information overload, and more “everything overload.”

I agree. Where once friendly (or not) employees answered business phones, now we have to navigate through layers of voice menus. Where not so long ago you could actually get help via hotline, now you have to read the FAQs online. And search for the hidden email link when they don’t answer your question. Where once our choices at the grocery store involved Rice, Wheat or Corn Chex, now there are more than a dozen varieties of Oreos. (Aren’t those by definition chocolate cookies with white icing between? Not anymore.)

Business has shifted a tremendous amount of work onto consumers and employees. We pump our own gas, pour our own soft drinks, and check out our own groceries. At work, we go online for HR transactions, order our own business cards, and manage our retirement plans (heaven help us). And whether we’re buying something, investing, or solving problems, we want to make good choices. And that takes time.

Combine all that with shifting corporate strategy, constant organizational change, 100 or more emails a day, web sites to check, iTunes, eBay, TiVo, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, instant messaging, cell phone text messages – aaaaaaaaagghh! Make it stop!

No wonder 80 percent of the complaints treated by doctors are stress-related.

This community invites you to join the discussion on communications overload:

– How can we reduce the feeling among employees that they’re being bombarded (often with irrelevant information)?
– How can we cut (and cut through) the clutter?
– How can we help our employers and clients communicate the right amount in the right way at the right time? (And not forget that communications travel in many directions?)

I don’t know what we’re about to unleash here, but I’m certain the discussion will be passionate. I expect the input will range from the 30,000-foot view to the immensely practical. From heartfelt questions to best practices to links to articles published elsewhere. We welcome it all.

Hang on to your hats.

Bill Boyd