When was the last time software billed as a "communication platform" actually made you more productive?
If we measure productivity by the number of emails we get in our inbox every day, we’re doing great. If we measure it by the number of tweets we receive, the Facebook posts we read and the meetings we attend, wow, are we productive.
Business communication is broken because most of the tools at hand kill more productivity, time and money than they create. To recover, we need to evolve from a model of indiscriminate emailing, posting and meeting to a future of targeted conversations.
Communication Overload is Burning Cash
I’ve made some big accusations against email, social media and meetings, but how damaging are they?
The most recent study on email comes from Dr. Ian M. Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State College of Medicine. Dr. Paul kept track of all his emails for an academic year and found that 2,035 mass distribution emails were received: 1,501 from the medical center, 450 from his department and 84 from the university.
Estimating that each took 30 seconds to read, and taking into account the average salary of doctors at the institution, email overload cost about $1,641 per physician per year. With more than 629 doctors on staff, that’s equates to more than $1 million in lost time.
Other studies have placed time lost to email higher. According to McKinsey, high-skill knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek managing e-mail. Increasing the productivity of social technologies could contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across commercial sectors in the U.S. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine found that office workers are interrupted roughly every three minutes and once interrupted it can take 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task.
Basex’s numbers do not include distractions from Facebook,
If broken communication is draining over $1.5 trillion per year in the U.S. alone, clearly we need to rethink our approach to communication.
Portrait of the Email as a Time Killer
Have you ever played the "instant messaging game" with email?
You email a question to Bob, and then Bob replies back with a cryptic answer, so you email Bob again. There’s about a five-minute delay between emails, and each time that little ding sounds and a little flag icon pops up on your taskbar, you’re distracted from what you’re doing. To get the answer to a one-line question, you have to write six emails and burn a half hour of your time.
Today, we get excited when we manage to empty an inbox, as if it were an accomplishment. The effort we put into this daily disposal ritual is silly, considering most of what we receive is clutter, as Dr. Paul found in his study. Email is failing because it’s not productive to spend hours managing your means of communication.
Social Networks are Social, Not Productive
Platforms like Yammer and Salesforce Chatter promise to make your organization more communicative and "collaborative" (please don’t get me started on that word). On big corporate campuses, yes, I think an internal social network does connect people and build unity. Moreover, chat-like communication gets more responses than email because messages seem urgent. However, chat is more disruptive than email.You can’t manage eight chat boxes at once and be productive at anything else.
Social media-inspired platforms claim that you can “boost engagement,” “gain visibility” and be “more informed,” but that is the problem! As the numbers show, people are already too engaged, conversations are too visible and employees don’t need more information to do their job.
What do Meetings Really Accomplish?
Meetings are communication sprinklers. Some people plan or accept meetings so they can zone out or be social. After all, 46% of Americans either don’t like or hate their job, and as executive coach Ray Williams explains well, meetings are perceived as a way to not work, and they will always fill the maximum amount of time allotted.
There are good reasons to meet – for instance, brainstorming and major decisions benefit from continuous dialogue. “Status updates” do not benefit from face time.
Breaking the Habit of Over-Communication
Most people need to be physically (or digitally) restrained from checking email, posting on social media and planning meetings. I offer five suggestions that will help us all:
1. Slash mass emails by at least 90%. Some emails might contain information that everyone needs to know, but that doesn’t mean you have to communicate by email. Consider alternate communication channels rather than using email for all communication. Such as signs for a parking lot closure, mobile messaging for crisis communications, and hand-written thank you cards from executives.
2. Ban email and social media one day per week. Rotate what days departments get to be email and social-free (e.g. Development, Monday; Marketing, Tuesday, and so on). Leave one person per department on email in case of an urgent matter. Watch in amazement as things get done.
3. Set a 30 minute maximum for all meetings. This will clear a lot of the chatter and tangents. It will also encourage people to prepare points, set agendas and make better use of the time.
4. Track engagement in top down communications.
5. Use articulate subject lines. “Hey,” “Announcement,” and “Please Read” are not coherent subjects. If you’re going take someone’s time with email, a social post or a mobile message, make it clear why you’re doing this.
Overall, let’s do less emailing, less posting, less meeting and more doing. We’re over-communicating, but we can choose to stop.
