Archive for the 'Impact and Symptoms' Category

Can’t they read?!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on October 28, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right?

So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply:

I can’t meet  Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM?

The reply I get says:

If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone?

This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?!

Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time, and so many distractions that they only scan the message ever so quickly and react to the first thing that registers. Which results in incomplete communication, which requires more mails to resolve the mess, which increases the load… a classic runaway positive feedback loop!

Paperclips and Facebook policy in the workplace

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on June 16, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
. 3 Comments

I remember well the hysteria around Internet use in the workplace. Back in the mid-nineties, it suddenly became possible for employees to access the newly invented World Wide Web from their computers at work, and managers in many companies were mortified: people might (perish the thought!) use company assets for non-business use, and in doing so waste work time!

Back then, we saw many knee-jerk reactions in the corporate world. Memos would be issued asserting that no one may access the net without written manager approval, based on “business need”; anyone who violated this wise edict would be severely punished! Of course, the major business need of getting acquainted with an incredible innovation that would revolutionize every business in a few years was not appreciated by the short sighted. Fortunately not everyone was that short sighted, and with time reality smacked the remainder in the face, and now web access is a given.

At the time I was involved in a discussion group where people dealing with these issues could exchange views. I particularly remember a comment by a professor who reacted to the concern of some participants that their employees will stop working if given web access. He wrote “employees who abuse this access and don’t do their jobs are just like employees who steal paperclips in the office to take home; I expect your companies know how to deal with that”. Wise words, which I put to good use when, having convinced my company to allow free web usage, I had to step in and handle cases of abuse. A criminal is a criminal; the majority of employees are responsible adults and should not be treated like children just to foil a few slackers.

I was reminded of this old argument when a student I was coaching submitted the results of a small survey she’d administered to Gen Y workers to characterize workplace policies around personal use of Facebook during work hours. She found an interesting gap between employers and employees. 47% of respondents’ workplaces had a policy forbidding such use entirely; 10% permitted unlimited use; only 10% allowed personal use during work hours as long as it did not interfere with work (the remaining 33% had no policy in place at all). In other words, of those employers that did have a policy, 70% were totally forbidding, 15% were totally permissive, and only 15% hit on the sensible, balanced, desirable solution: trust your employees to do what’s right. Let them enjoy a little social networking while putting the interest of the job first – without being policed.

Meanwhile, the employees surveyed were asked what they think the policy ought to be; 77% advocated the sensible policy stated above, while only 3% advocated unlimited use (13% were for permitting use after formal work hours, and 10% were in favor of a total ban). In other words, 77% of employees had the wisdom and the restraint to support a policy that balances work and personal needs, putting the work duties first; only 15% of employer policies reflected such wisdom. Hmmm…

The good news, at any rate, is that just as with the Internet, Facebook is here to stay, and the new Gen Y cohort of employees will bring it into the workplace whether or not management likes it. Hopefully – and I am optimistic here – managers will realize before long that employees who can be trusted around paperclips can be trusted around Facebook too. The above data point shows that they can.


Email Overload and Organizational structure

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on May 16, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
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I was discussing email overload with two VPs in a hi-tech company, and one of them   shared the observation that he had been suffering from heavy email loads until an auspicious event happened: he had appointed a more junior person to manage part of his activity, and the overload disappeared.

Of course one hopes he had good cause to appoint the subordinate to the role, other than to ease his own Inbox nightmare; but even so, it is interesting to consider what has been talking place here. There can be a number of mechanisms at play:

  1. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of unimportant mail from below, which were now being deleted by the subordinate (and harming the latter’s productivity).
  2. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of important mail from below, which were now intercepted and handled in more timely fashion by his subordinate in the latter’s line of duty.
  3. The VP had been receiving massive amounts of mail from other organizations (not his own group) that were now sent directly instead to his subordinate for handling.

We could go on, but the main thing is that these scenarios differ significantly in what they tell us of the organization’s work processes. In scenario 1, the useless mail kept coming, and an expensive management resource was being used as a “human shield” to protect the VP. In scenario 2, the addition of the lower manager was causing a re-division of work in a sensible way, freeing the VP – presumably – to do other tasks. Scenario 3 tells us that the appointment was accompanied by a redefinition of workflows in the larger organization.

And then there is a possible fourth scenario, which thankfully did not happen in this case: the load on the VP could have stayed the same, while his helper would have had a similar load. This can happen if the organization is so smitten with over-communication that everyone would copy both managers, quite unnecessarily. It is an electronic version of Parkinson’s Law – “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. More employees – more available time to do email!

A sad vignette of family life in the email era

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on May 5, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
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An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today:

One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed:

I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time.

A lovely domestic  tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload.

By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once a week to my Grandma’s home (she had the only TV set in the familt back then) to watch  “The Forsyte Saga” on the single B&W channel available then. Television watching – for all its shortcomings – was at least about family togetherness in the days before email!

The price of extreme mobility

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on April 16, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
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Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages.

This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of the use of these little wonders is that the quality of the interaction has suffered a good deal. This is because when you receive a message of moderate or larger size on a PC, you typically read or scan the entire body text, check out the attachments if needed,  then make an informed reply. On a BlackBerry, by contrast, the tiny screen causes people to read only the top of the message, ignore the attachments, and shoot off a quick reply without having absorbed the full message with all its content and nuances. These messages, he said, are very easy to identify as being from a handheld device – they clearly transmit the fact that the sender hasn’t read the message in any depth before replying.

Of course, there is one case where this is acceptable: when the exchange is of terse one-liners, as in “Can we push the meeting to 5PM?” – “Yes“. In these cases, being able to communicate on the go is very valuable and the medium is well suited to the message. Not so with longer messages, which end up requiring further exchanges for clarification, adding to the overall information overload.

Perhaps we need a separate mailing paradigm for handheld and computer – use the handheld only without attachments and in short bursts of communication, and reserve replies to  longer messages for the PC… but of course, the temptation – some say, addiction – of cleaning out one’s email in real time is too strong to allow such distinctions to catch on… :-(

Our evolving attention span

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on March 25, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
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One obvious aspect of this hectic day and age is that people’s attention span is much shorter than it used to be. As has been pointed out before, almost nobody reads books the length of War and Peace anymore…

With all the media around us moving to shorter and shorter sound bytes and communication  happening in SMS messages and tweets, it would be natural to speculate that the cause of the shortening attention span is the influence – one can even say manipulation – of all these media. And yet it seems to go beyond a simple reaction; because there is a change in people’s inherent ability to process information in a leisurely and thorough manner.

This was pointed out to me by a client who told me he can no longer read a book, or watch a movie on TV, without stopping and getting up every half hour or so. When he was younger, he recalled, this wasn’t the case; something had changed in him. This man is in his fifties, so he isn’t your typical hyperactive millennial with earbuds in his ears and a game controller in his hand; he has every reason to be patient and attentive. And yet he can no longer do what he did before, and what countless generations of his ancestors – and mine, and yours – would naturally do.

I can attest to seeing the same phenomenon in myself… a kind of restlessness that interferes with long periods of concentrated reading. I often cringe when I open some article or blog post and discover it is a long one… and a training manager in a company I know, which still has a real library on the premises (a disappearing breed), told me that employees no longer check out books – they’d never find the quiet time to read them.

The question is, is this change in our mental machinery reversible? Would we be able to find the peace of reading, old style, even if the pressure from outside were to ease up? For instance: will a high-tech knowledge worker who retires revert to the leisurely information consumption of centuries past – or will he also have to get up every 30 minutes, with no real external cause? And what of the kids entering the workplace today, those who had never known another reality?

Do you know the answer?

Does Local Culture impact email style?

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on March 10, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
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I was lecturing on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and when I got to the part about “write succinct, terse, clear mails” an attendee raised his hand to ask me, how would that be perceived by recipients in the United Kingdom? Turns out that they had a workshop on global cultural gaps and it included the notion that the British like to start with small talk and only get to the point later; so they ought to find very short emails rude!

Good point, that. Having also worked in a global corporation, I am very much aware of the importance of local culture differences. We too had classes on how to interface with colleagues from distant lands; good thing too, considering my nation’s no-nonsense approach to conversation (to put it mildly). On the other hand, with email loads out of control, who can afford to spend time on polite chit-chat?

I don’t know of any research that looks at correlations of culture and email style or verbosity. If you know of some, let us all know in the comments. I did ask a British colleague, and he tells me that although a polite opening was common in traditional emails, with the growth of smartphones, this nicety is being dropped (often along with any salutation) and the norms in the UK are becoming aligned ever more closely with the US.

What do you think? Do people in your culture welcome excessive brevity in communications – or is it perceived as too abrupt and uncivilized?

Do share!

Do not disturb! Doctors’ visit in progress!

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on February 22, 2011
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the  ward – the physicians need to concentrate, and their visit is religiously shielded from all disturbance.

Or is it? I was at the World Usability Day conference recently, and after lecturing on Information Overload in corporate settings I was treated to a fascinating lecture by Prof. Yoel Donchin of the Hadassah Medical School, who has been studying the matter of interruptions and distractions during these medical visits. These were defined as anything that causes the doctor to focus attention on something other than the purpose of the visit. The research was done in detail and with careful statistical methodology. Care to guess how many times, on average, a group of visiting doctors are distracted during a two-hour visit?

Did you guess 80? Yep… the exact figure is 83 distractions per visit.  Some of these are bearable perhaps, like noisy activities in the background or nurses talking among themselves, but there were nine distractions per visit that forced a full suspension of the execution of the visit for a while, like phone calls and unrelated conversations involving the visiting doctors.

Obviously, the ability of the medics to focus on the matter at hand – the patients and their illnesses – must suffer a good deal with all this interrupting going on at a rate of once every 1.5 minutes. In that respect things are no different than with other knowledge workers in other environments – and yet, in a hospital setting this is really worrying. It is at least encouraging that Hadassah is conducting this in-depth research to understand what is happening in detail – and, I understand from Dr. Donchin, to examine remedial changes in the procedures and organizational culture that make this reality possible.

Is there a downside to Quiet Time?

Published
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Nathan Zeldes
on December 13, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 1 Comment

I was lecturing at Ben Gurion University about Information Overload, and one attendee challenged me with this question: has the cost of disconnecting from the continuous barrage of communications been quantified?

What he meant was this: the accepted wisdom in the Info Overload community is that it is advisable to take time out, “Quiet Time”, pre-assigned time slots in the workday when you don’t pull in incoming messages and calls and try to secure some isolation from interruptions. This allows one to get a stretch of concentrated focused thinking, which can do wonders for creativity, quality and effectiveness. But, as this guy pointed out, it is possible that in doing so you will miss out on important communications, or be perceived as unresponsive and piss off your customers, or slow down the work of your team. Has anyone measured this downside of “Quiet Time”?

The short answer is, not to my knowledge. There have been a number of research reports about the cost of not having focus time (and the numbers can be horrific), but I know of no research into the flip side of this.

A longer answer is, while we don’t have numbers here, I believe that the cost of disconnection can’t be prohibitive because this cost is something we can control by defining intelligently how we take the quiet stretches. To be sure, you can overdo it: I knew one guy (a Fellow at a large corporation) who only read his email twice a week; that would be a bad idea for almost anyone – too little connectivity unless you’re a trappist monk. But if you handle it right, you can retain sufficient interactivity and still have some time to think; taking 2-3 quiet hours at a time will not be too disruptive for most jobs. You need to strike a balance.

To avoid annoying your customers, you can have the best of both worlds – quiet and communication – by building into your methodology a means to reach you based on urgency. I wrote about this in a previous post. But if you’re part of a larger team, as many of us are, it helps if you design the Quiet Time methodology in coordination with your team mates; this has been tried in various places with good results, for instance in the developer team documented in Prof. Perlow’s book “Finding Time“. And if you do it right, you can make the “cost of missed interruptions” as small as you like, while the benefit of being able to think remains fixed. That’s good enough by me…

Overloaded child/parent communications

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on November 29, 2010
in Impact and Symptoms
. 2 Comments

I remember how as a small child in the fifties my family would go on Saturday to lunch at my grandma’s. It was quite a tiring walk across town (we had no car then) and it had occurred to me that as we had no telephone either, there was no way to cancel the get together if there was an unexpected need. But of course there wasn’t; life moved much more sedately then, and the meal would be waiting for us time after time. There was little need of frequent communication.

That was then. Now, we were having dinner at a restaurant with some friends when their cellphone rang. It was one of their kids with some minor query. After a while, their cellphone rang again.  It was another of their kids with some minor query. After a while, their cellphone rang yet again.  It was the third of their kids with some minor query.

Of course, parents do like to be in touch with their kids, but this made me wonder: what impact do cellphones have on the child/parent link? These days practically every child, and every parent, carries these little wonders of radio communications. In the past, when landlines ruled, a parent might ring home once during an evening out, to check with the babysitter. Today, communications flow far more frequently, in this case interrupting the parents’ evening rather than the child’s. Such constant communication would have been neither possible nor necessary until quite recently.

So what do you think - is this a change for the better or for the worse?