Archive for the 'Organizational Solutions' Category

Volkswagen shields its employees from its own Blackberries

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on December 24, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors remained the same.

Now we read about a bold move by a company that has decided to take responsibility for this problem. Car maker Volkswagen has interrupted the flow of distracting messages at the source; they’ve disabled the move of email messages to the Blackberry servers 30 minutes after the end of formal work hours, and until 30 minutes before the next workday begins. This will bring about  what I like to call a “Technology assisted behavior change”: one that uses a technological component to make it impossible to violate a required behavior.

It’s encouraging to see that Volkswagen values its employees’ Work/Life balance and is willing to take an affirmative step to protect their personal time. In addition to being the right and  moral thing to do, it is a smart move as well – employees that can relax after hours with their families will be much more focused and productive at work. It’s a Win/Win, and I hope other companies will take note. The fact that they involved the employees in defining this move is significant and should help this succeed.

Let me know if your own organization would consider this!

Cues for useless email?

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on September 28, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

One of the slides in my Information Overload lecture analyzes the root causes of sending useless email, and goes into the very human motivators stemming from mistrust in many corporate cultures. One of these is CYA – sending mail, or copying too many people on it, to cover one’s backside.

So in a recent lecture one of my audience, not being a native English speaker, raised her hand and asked what CYA meant. I translated it for her and explained how people might send mail to people who had no need for it merely to cover themselves from any objection. She immediately got it, but another attendee said he thought I had meant the CYA was for use in the subject line of the message, to indicate its true nature – like the other cues I advocate using: HOT, FYI, etc.

Obviously this is not going to happen; no one will specify that they’re sending a message for this reason. But one may dream… surely we could all benefit if it were customary and required for people who send useless mail to prefix the subject with cues like CYA, or USELESS, or BS, or DELETEME… indeed, as computers get ever more powerful, we could delegate adding the cues to the email server, based on semantic analysis of the message’s content. We already have tools analyzing messages for importance (like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, or ClearContext for Outlook); why can’t they analyze them for inconsiderate, useless content?

Oh well…

Some powerful role modeling

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 25, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Here is a wonderful example of how a manager can drive the battle on Information Overload in person.

A manager of a large tech company told me that he is personally very intent on making his company “quiet” in the direct sense of doing away with the endless ringing and loud conversations that the ubiquitous use of cellphones has brought into the open office spaces in his plant. This is of course wise, because the constant distraction by the phones of one’s coworkers is known to be a major disruptive factor in creative thinking, productivity and quality of work.

So what does he do about it? Many things, but the one I enjoyed most is this: every batch of new hires in the company goes through “New Hire Training”’, and the general manager gives the opening welcome lecture there. And at the beginning of the lecture, as the very first thing the excited new recruits hear, and from the most senior manager in the company at that, he pulls out a cellphone and asks the audience who has one. Of course they all raise their hands. He then tells them that if they expect a personally urgent message from their family or some such, they may keep the phone on and react to it when it rings by leaving the room quietly to respond. All others he asks to turn the things off – and he shows them that his own instrument is switched off as well.

Wayda go!

The unsung heroes of Information Overload

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on August 3, 2011
in Analysis and Opinion and Organizational Solutions
. 1 Comment

By now there are many people out there helping others to cope with, and mitigate, information overload. Some, like me in my  previous career as an Intel Principal Engineer, do it because it’s their job and helps their employer. Others, like me in my current consulting career, do it to help our clients. Either way, it’s always been my passion, but you could argue that it’s also a living, and that’s true: we get paid to apply our knowledge and skills on behalf of the companies we help out.

But there is a third type of people who act against the flood of information, and they aren’t paid to do so. I ran into one of them recently at a large Fortune 500. This guy contacted me and asked to discuss my views of email overload; of course I was happy to do so. It turned out, he told me over a cup of coffee, that he’s organizing and delivering lectures on IO that he’s developed himself, to groups of employees all over his company. It wasn’t part of his job, and he did it above his ordinary day job; indeed, given the way people are fully loaded, it probably came at the expense of his meager free time. But he was passionate about freeing his coworkers from the weight of all those countless messages of dubious value, and he went about it with great enthusiasm. He was making a difference.

What this guy was, of course, is a Grassroots Change Agent. Being a change agent is hard enough when you’re a senior engineer with the support of your management; doing it by yourself from below is outright daunting. It is also invaluable; this guy, and the other heroes like him throughout the business world, have my admiration and respect!

The one-page principle

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 18, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

There is a quote attributed to Mark Ardis:  “A specification [or a design, a procedure, a test plan] that will not fit on one page of 8.5-by-11 inch paper cannot be understood“. This is called “The one-page principle”.

Other than being a snappy quote, this is something to consider seriously. A significant aspect of the email overload people suffer is carried in the attachments; indeed, my first inkling that email was becoming a problem, back around 1994, was when a senior manager in my workplace had declared that he refuses to read any email that has any attachments at all. Of course that was over-reaction, but a one-page attachment versus a ten-page one can make a huge difference in the load, especially if you receive a score of them each day. A manager that can induce his or her subordinates to write shorter documents will derive immediate benefit both for self and for the organization. A simple rule like “I won’t read any proposal that is longer than one page” can make a big difference (there was a  CEO who was said to have implemented such a rule, though I forget who it was). So can a decision like “all status reports must be written in bullets format and cover no more than half a page”. And for documents who by their very nature require more pages, one can still demand a clear half-page management summary,

Of course, the benefits of driving a culture of short documents go beyond email overload reduction. It promotes excellent habits, such as being mindful of others’ time. And it encourages the keyboard equivalent of the classic “Put brain in gear before putting mouth in motion“.

If you manage people, give it a try!

Go home to your children!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on March 1, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

One affliction of the modern knowledge worker is that people don’t see their children: first, because they work late in the office; and then, because they spend their hours in the home clearing their email.

I was pleased to read in today’s morning paper, then, that the Israeli civil service is going to adopt policies that will mitigate at least part of this issue. A report whose recommendations were approved by the cabinet will make government employ more parenting-friendly. There will be  summer camps for employees’ kids, there will be a  move to output-based employee assessment (rather than time based), and what I like most – working parents will be allowed to leave at 3PM once a week to spend time with their children.

Of course, a lot depends on the details, which need to be worked out and implemented by a special committee – an inevitable but not always effective route. But if all goes well, one sector of workers in Israel will spend a longer afternoon with their families, and that is a really good thing. As to whether they’ll use the extra time to do email – well, that’s where I might come in… :-)

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on February 15, 2011
in Organizational Solutions
. 3 Comments

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years.

More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms.

I’ve been preaching a move from email towards other platforms – internal social networks, blogs and RSS feeds, shared workspaces and so forth – for some years now; but this is the first time I see a large corporation deciding to make such a bold leap. And they’re likening the situation to the trend of curbing physical environmental pollution in the aftermath of the industrial revolution – a bold analogy.

Of course God is in the details, as the saying goes; it is interesting and important to consider what is involved in this plan. Obviously email itself is not going away entirely; they will need it to communicate with their external customers and stakeholders. And they will need a method to bridge external email and internal networking: if you want to forward a message from a client to a coworker, you will not want to start cutting and pasting, especially if the coworker needs to respond to the original sender. But three years should be enough to solve such issues if they have their mind set on it, and they clearly do.

The most heartening fact in this story is that the deal seems driven with great enthusiasm by the CEO. Furthermore, this CEO sounds convinced of what I’ve been saying for 15 years: email overload imposes a severe toll on the company’s ability to succeed. With such role modeling and leadership, Atos Origin should have a good chance at making this drastic change a success.

An overlooked, sure-fire way to regain work time

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on January 29, 2011
in Individual Solutions and Organizational Solutions
. 1 Comment

I was talking to a client who – like most of us – needed more hours in the day, and he complained that part of the problem was that he was required to generate long reports, and it took him hours and hours just to type them in. So I asked him, how does he type? Turns out he uses two fingers to peck at the keyboard. I asked him, why not ten? Why doesn’t he touch type?

Of course he couldn’t touch type, nor was he planning to learn to; and neither do almost all the knowledge workers I know. Which is amazing, if you stop to consider it, because if your job involves primarily one machine, and you can operate that machine faster or slower, why not learn to do it faster?

Touch typing allows you to bang out some 60 words per minute (wpm). Hunt and Peck – the common use of two fingers – gives maybe 30 wpm. So it stands to reason that any large organization would benefit by mandating touch typing classes for all employees who use computers on a daily basis. The payback would be huge, for the company and for the individual. It takes a few weeks, and then – from that day to the end of one’s career – one can be so much faster on the job, saving precious lifetime for either more output or more leisure. Why don’t they do so?

Typewriter keysPart of the problem may be that typing is no longer a profession. In days past, there were typists: people – mostly women – adept in the use of a typewriter. They were trained and hired to type fast and accurately; in fact, some were stenographers, trained in the art of shorthand, both with pencil and with a specialized steno machine. The extreme speeds achieved by stenography were especially sought in real-time transcription as used in a court of law, allowing as they did to capture over 120 wpm. By contrast, today a lot of typing is done by people with other job names – managers, engineers, technicians… people who are judged on other skills, to the neglect of keyboard wizardry. We’d moved much of the task of typing from the secretaries to the managers and engineers, but forgot to train the latter in the basic skills of the former.

Now, stenography is almost extinct these days, and requires some pretty specialized equipment and training; I’m not suggesting you master it. But there are countless schools and software programs that teach you touch typing, and it uses the same keyboard you already have; nor do you need anyone’s permission to learn it.

Think about it…

Photo courtesy Valeriana Solaris, shared on flickr under CC license.

A blast from the past: weekly status updates

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 22, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 0 Comments

Periodic status reports are one area where you would do well to look for information overload improvement opportunities. In many organizations the network hums with daily reports, weekly reports, and monthly reports, often with large amounts of redundancy. Just take a critical look around you, or in the mirror…

But something reminded me the other day of an extreme example of such redundancy, going back to 1982. I had just joined Intel and relocated to Silicon Valley for some on-the-job training, and among the many wonders of the American Way I was introduced to a wonderful method of sharing status information within our team. Being new, I did not view it critically then; I was just amazed…

Here’s how this worked: every Friday a half dozen of us would get into a small conference room for a weekly team meeting. Each of us had written a weekly status report (with pen on paper, personal computers not having yet penetrated the corporate world) and photocopied six copies ahead of the meeting. Once in the room, we would hand around copies to our peers, so we each ended with a sheaf of everyone else’s reports. Then we’d take turns talking about the week’s events – basically lecturing what was written in our reports. This part was certainly useful, and since there were no laptops or blackberries to distract us with email, it led to real brainstorming and sharing. And then… then we’d all go back to our cubicles and throw all the paper into the large trash cans they contained.

Sounds silly? Oh yes, but again: take a look around you. To be sure, most of the traffic is electronic today, which may save trees (though don’t all those electrons come from somewhere too?) But the redundancy, and the senseless distribution of information without regard to actual need to consume it, these are still there. Who knows, maybe in a few decades someone will blog about it with retrospective derision too…

The decay to the rest state

Published
by
Nathan Zeldes
on July 4, 2010
in Organizational Solutions
. 2 Comments

Happy independence day to our American friends!…

Today I want to draw your attention to a phenomenon that is quite familiar to us physicists, but has a place in driving solutions to information overload as well. I refer to the decay to a rest state.

In physics, this is often seen when a system is pushed up to a high energy state: it will lose energy and “decay” to its state of equilibrium. Thus, a mug of hot coffee – a critical item in a knowledge worker’s routine – will lose heat and eventually reach room temperature if you don’t drink it promptly. You need to pump in energy continuously, perhaps by keeping it on a Mug Warmer, to keep it hot.

So how does this apply to Information Overload? Actually it applies to most efforts to change organizational behavior by one initial push. Say you deploy a training program to educate your group to improve their email behavior. Experience shows that what will happen is this: at first, people will be energized by all the new ideas and motivated to apply them. Email effectiveness will go up, work will be more efficient, and people may even get to go home early and see their children awake. But then, as the months pass by, the behaviors will start to decline, and after a year or two everything may go back to where it started – high load, low effectiveness, and devastated Work/Life balance. The equilibrium state…

You see it happen in many programs. Prof. Leslie Perlow reports seeing this decay, within 6 months, at the end of her famous “Quiet Time” pilot, described in her book “Finding Time”. I’ve also seen it happen with a number of training programs we’ve launched at Intel over my career. This decay is a strange phenomenon because there is nothing to be gained by it; everyone is worse off in the “rest state”. So why do smart workers allow it to happen?

Prof. Perlow ascribes this to the lack of a sufficiently comprehensive change in all the related cultural aspects: if the underlying causes of a destructive behavior pattern remain, they will drive people back to where they were. In addition, there is the simple fact that many modern organizations are in a state of constant churn, with reorganizations, mergers, and personnel movement causing new people to come and others to leave a group, diluting the learned lessons. And if a senior manager who was supportive of a change is replaced with one who is not, subordinates will instantly respond to the new manager’s priorities.

So what can we do? For starters, it is important to try and integrate the desired practices as deeply and widely as possible into the organizational culture, affording them protection from the buffeting currents of short-term change. And as long as management remains supportive, you can simply do what the mug warmer does – pump in new energy, that is, maintain the desired state by providing ongoing leadership, role modeling, and periodic refresher training. This last is not expensive, and should be considered as a requirement when you plan a deployment of a training-based program in Info Overload space.