Colleague Spam Saps Productivity
By 2009, the Radicati Group has predicted that the average knowledgeworker will spend 41% of her time managing email. That’s astounding, but not out of the question in my opinion. One of the side effects of all the social media and “web 2.0″ collaboration tools available to us is a huge increase in email.
In an article a couple weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal, Rebecca Buckman said:
“Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam. Inboxes are bulging today partly because of what some are calling “colleague spam” — that is, too many people are indiscriminately hitting the “reply to all” button or copying too many people on trivial messages, like inviting 100 colleagues to partake of brownies in the kitchen. A good chunk of today’s emails are also coming from brand new sources, like social- and business-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., or text messages forwarded from cellphones.”
I am both guilty of spreading the problem to colleagues (I’m a Facebook and LinkedIn user) and often invite them to connect with me. I’m not so worried about that “good chunk” of email sources - since (at least for me) they have high business value.
My issue is with email from within organizations whereby the cc: list wraps names like garlands on a tree. At that point, people - blog it - your subscribers can choose to:
- react by commenting on your post publicly (within your firewall)
- engage in a 1:1 dialogue with you about your post (in email - an appropriate use)
- start a new threaded discussion that could benefit the entire organization
I’m talking not only about banana bread in the lunchroom; I’m talking planning for an upcoming customer visit, product launch, brand discussion, patch release, product enhancement, research project.
As I’ve noted many times before, email is no longer the venue for such collaborations when we have tools like Clearspace, Wordpress, and Attensa’s RSS platform.
Employees can then opt-into discussions they care about, and ignore those they don’t - at their own time, on their own terms, and under their own controls.
Hi Janet … good link and thoughts … thanks for sharing. My question is … do we merely displace the time from email to an opt-in discussion in Clearspace, or can we show that (a) the time invested is less and (b) the value gained is higher.
Are you aware of any current studies on this, because if not, we should talk about doing one!
M.
Michael, let’s talk about doing just that - it’s a great idea to create a study.
My point about value gained is the nature of the opt-in discussion vs. inclusion in email threads.
You might not invest less time in the discussion, but you’re investing more attention, awareness and (therefore, I hope) more thoughtfulness.
Thanks for your email
… will respond today.
One part of me says “so what” to the assertions above … if we choose to communicate through text-mediated channels, then duh! of course we are going to spend more time in email or other tools. But the more interesting question is … what tools are most effective for such text-mediated communication, and why.
Talk soon,
M.