my Leschke-Kahle was fed up with employees griping about information overload,
their overflowing e-mail boxes and the family time they were losing as they struggled
to stay afloat in a digital flood.
So the development manager of internal employee training at
Moline, Illinois-based John Deere set out nearly two years ago to offer a training
class at the agricultural and forestry company, which employs 52,000 people worldwide.
Her goal was not just to provide software tools, but to train interested employees
to better handle e-mails, reports, text messages and numerous other competing information
priorities without retreating into a self-defeatist mind-set.
Since that first pilot course, involving about 20 employees
in late 2006, at least 400 people have completed the nine-hour multi-week training
at John Deere. Nearly nine out of 10 employees surveyed at least eight weeks after
the training report that they’re using the strategies to ease their daily workload,
Leschke-Kahle says.
"What I’ve found is that for most people it’s not so much
the issue of having the right piece of software or the right tool or the right gadget,"
she says. "What the training does is it opens people’s awareness up to the fact
that, ‘Yes, I can manage this.’ And it gives them a toolbox to start figuring out
what works for them."
Information overload: the term has become used nearly to
the point of cliché, but the phenomenon at corporate desks is real. Slightly
more than seven out of every 10 U.S. workers report feeling inundated, according
to a
LexisNexis survey
of 650 white-collar workers in December 2007. Forty-one percent say they will reach
a "breaking point" if the volume continues to escalate.
Still, many corporate leaders have been slow to intervene
and offer employee support, says Nathan Zeldes, a principal engineer at Intel who
has been studying information-overload interventions at the Santa Clara, California-based
semiconductor company for more than a decade.
"A small number of companies are taking some action," he says.
But comprehensive strategies or training efforts—beyond, say, offering a dozen tips
to reduce e-mail volume—remain limited at this point, he says.
Several stumbling blocks exist, say experts in the evolving
field. To start, few companies employ an information-overload guru or other designated
person with oversight responsibilities. Meanwhile, hard data about return on investment
at the individual company level remains scarce, driven in part by the difficulty
in measuring the productivity of a knowledge worker, whose product is ideas rather
than keystrokes or widgets.
But corporate attention has recently begun to coalesce. In
June, the
Information Overload Research Group
was formed to raise awareness and to encourage more research. The nonprofit organization
has attracted some high-profile names, including Google and Morgan Stanley, along
with academics and product vendors, such as ClearContext, and is holding its inaugural
conference July 15 in New York. Also in June, Zeldes
released data from two Intel pilot projects,
one focused on restricting e-mail and the other a "quiet time" initiative designed
to encourage 300 engineers and managers to disconnect every Tuesday morning so they
can better focus on complex cognitive tasks.
Workload on steroids
In many senses, information overload is nothing more than the eternal conundrum
of time management—albeit on steroids. For generations, an employee’s workload was
naturally constrained by the number of meetings and phone calls that could fit into
a given day, says Michael Linenberger, a corporate trainer and author of the book
Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook.
In today’s business world, someone can write a full request
via e-mail, hit "send" and: "Tag, you’re it," Linenberger says. "You now have the
potential to have hundreds of business interactions a day without your ever being
involved in [generating] them."
Other influences aggravate the situation. Telecommuting, sometimes
across continents, eliminates the option of talking across cubicles or walking down
the hall. Younger generations entering the workforce are comfortable with and dependent
upon more technology, not less.
E-mail is "yesterday’s problem," says Gloria Mark, a professor
of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She ticks off numerous other
attention-scattering intrusions: text messaging, instant messaging and social networking
sites, among others. What can be lost in the process is that magical super-productive,
creative state—dubbed "flow" by psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi—during which
a computer programmer might achieve a coding breakthrough or a consultant hammer
out an insightful report.
Mark co-authored a
research study,
published in 2005, which determined that information workers were interrupted every
12 minutes by something unrelated to the task at hand. Three-fourths of the time,
the employee resumed the interrupted work the same day. But on average, it took
them 25 minutes to get back on track.
In an effort to discourage such interruptions, Intel piloted
a seven-month "quiet time" initiative, which wrapped up in March. For four hours
every Tuesday morning, the 300 employees in Austin, Texas, and Chandler, Arizona,
completely disconnected. E-mail and instant messaging were turned off and phones
were forwarded to voice mail. Meetings were discouraged.
At the end of the pilot, 45 percent described the approach
as effective. Seventy-one percent said the approach should be extended to other
Intel groups.
Some employees used the freed-up time to focus on creative
tasks, Zeldes says. Employees who interact with clients a lot said the window allowed
them to catch up, restoring their equilibrium, he says. But there were some hiccups
along the way. A few months into the project, some employees had to be reminded
that interruptions were OK if an urgent work situation arose, says Zeldes. "People
need to use their common sense," he says.
Frontline strategies
To better assist overwhelmed employees, companies need to provide direction on two
fronts, says Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst of Basex Inc., a knowledge economy
research firm in New York. The firm last year released a white paper titled "Information
Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us."
First, Spira says, employees should be taught how to better
handle incoming e-mail and related tasks. Just as important, employees must learn
how their own behaviors can adversely affect others. Senior managers need to discourage
a "reply all" and cover-your-back mentality that launches lengthy and productivity-sapping
e-mail chains.
Companies also need to train employees in technology tools
beyond just e-mail sorting programs, Spira says. For example, virtual deal rooms
can be set up online, providing participants with a central location to store documents
and related correspondence. Neither does every discussion need to be immortalized
in writing, Linenberger adds. Employees should consider when a brief phone conversation
might be faster, strengthening a business relationship in the process.
As companies move forward, they also may realize that strategies
need to be tailored to the employees involved, Zeldes says. Intel’s second pilot,
discouraging e-mail on Fridays within working groups, didn’t receive as positive
a response as the "quiet time" initiative. Just 29 percent of the 150 engineers
and managers involved endorsed the approach, although 60 percent did recommend trying
it with other Intel groups. The issue seemed to be that while the employees involved
had desks near one another, they were frequently caught in meetings or traveling
and thus couldn’t jettison e-mail, Zeldes says.
Measuring ROI
For the two pilots, Zeldes couldn’t point to any return on investment, in terms
of increased productivity or other payoffs. It’s very difficult, he says, to measure
the cognitive output of a knowledge worker. At John Deere, Leschke-Kahle questions
whether such an analysis is even necessary, arguing that the results are obvious.
"People tell us it works," she says. "I think you have happier,
more productive employees."
More hard data will be needed to persuade leaders of Fortune
500 companies to significantly invest in training and related software tools, says
Max Christoff, a founding member of the Information Overload Research Group and
an information technology specialist. Even so, companies ignore the potential competitive
angle at their peril, say experts in information overload. For instance, Leschke-Kahle
was reluctant to divulge too many details of John Deere’s training, describing the
company’s approach as unique and proprietary. At this point, any information-driven
company can reap a competitive edge if they can better handle the incoming deluge
of information, Christoff says.
"We are reaching a saturation point," he says, regarding how
fast and long employees can work. "Now the competitive advantage comes to the extent
that we can filter it [information], make it more meaningful and make it more actionable."
Beyond e-mail
The John Deere training, which includes a number of Linenberger’s strategies, focuses
on more than just e-mail headaches, Leschke-Kahle says. The overarching goal is
to help employees to design their own approach to handling not just e-mail but also
reports, phone messages and those random sticky notes. "It takes emotional and intellectual
energy to go through each of those things every day and say, ‘Where did I put that?’
"
A fundamental building block of the training course is to
stop whining, Leschke-Kahle says, and she’s only half joking. If people complained
less about information overload, she argues, they could free up 5 percent to 10
percent of every workday.
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