Enterprise Social Media - A powerful alternative to flooded mailboxes

Hello Readers,

Greetings!!!

In my recent conversation with one of our customers, an unusual request came up which triggered a very interesting discussion. Customer wanted us to assess the email culture in their teams and find out if engineers have to tendency to miss any important emails because of large number of incoming emails. According to the customer, most of their staff is getting hundreds of emails every day and obviously not every email is important for everyday work. The fear is, what if people get into the habit of ignoring emails and miss out something important.

After this discussion, the first thought which came into my mind was: “isn’t it a problem with every organization?” I think it is. Be it my current organization, previous employers or the customers I have worked with, I have not only faced this problem, but also ignorantly added to the problem.

So the question here is, is there a solution to this problem? If yes, then what would it be and how complicated it is? If no, what is the best way to ensure that no important emails remain un-noticed?

A precursor would be “how many of us would see this as a problem?” I am assuming that more than 50% of us would not see this as a problem. However, since our customers see this as a problem, then we must have a solution. That’s IT Service Industry for you. Yow know that’s how it goes!!! Pun Intended!

Alright so before we get into a possible solution, let’s define and measure the problem. In order to do that, we need to analyze the kind of emails we receive in a week and categorize them. There are three high level categories can be defined:

-          Category 1 - Actionable Emails

-          Category 2 - Work Related Information (CCs etc.)

-          Category 3 - General Information/Group Emails

Going further, we need to do some sampling on emails received last few weeks. (The sampling must be done during the usual work-month not in the holiday season). We need to categorize each email in one of the defined categories.

I targeted first and last week of a month do the sampling and then did the categorization exercise. Here are the results:

In a given week, only 30% of the emails I received are Actionable Email. Of the remaining, 40% (i.e. 30% of the total) are Work Related Information and rest are General Information/Group Email. I ran this test one more time and observed similar results.

Workweeks	Category 1	Category 2	Category 3
Week1(month start)	30%	30%	40%
Week2(month end)	35%	35%	30%
Week3(random sample)	28%	25%	47%
Week4(random sample)	36%	40%	24%
Week5(random sample)	30%	25%	45%

 

 I did this test with a colleague of mine and found similar results.

On the whole, the results were eye opening. Some of us might not be agreeing with these numbers and that’s perfectly alright because it depends upon multiple things like nature of work, job level, team size, organization culture etc. However, we can’t disagree with the fact that there are lot of emails all of us get on our official email IDs that have nothing to do with the work.

In the second phase of my study, I tried to analyze the Category 3 - General Information type of emails and understand what value they are bringing into my professional life. They only value I see in those emails is a little distraction which can keep us motivated at times. Examples are Announcements, Events, News, Blogs, Notifications and Advertisements etc.

A similar analysis was done on Category 2 emails that are Work Related Information emails. Surprisingly, in this category, 50% of the emails are just for my information where no action is expected from me currently or in future. The other 50% were intended to me so that I can prepare myself for possible future action.

Based on these studies, I was convinced that something must be done to those non-value adding email. The natural impulse was to find a way to stop the Category 3 emails and put some restrictions on Category 2 emails by encouraging people to “not to reply to all”. But when I saw category 2& 3 emails from the organizational perspective, I felt that there is a need for all these Category 2 & 3 emails.  However, I was certain that these emails don’t have a place the pile of all Category 1 emails.

Then I thought about LinkedIn & Facebook and the way we get all kind of information on this platforms which is related to our professional life but not directly to our job and I realized that social media can play a great role in cleaning up our mailboxes by providing right place to all those Category 2 & Category 3 emails. The beauty of social media platforms is that there is no pile on. When I want to, I can be actively contributing and otherwise I can just be a spectator. (TV is a lean-back medium, Internet is a lean-forward medium and social media can be both – Unknown)

So just imagine a LinkedIn or Facebook like platform within an organization. Anybody can post an update something s/he wants to share. S/he can decide the audiences. S/he can “tag” people who are closer to the information. For example:

And there can be many more. We all see these emails in our mailboxes but I strongly feel that social media platform is the appropriate place for them.

So have we found a solution here? Well let’s do a quick argument

By implementing a social media platform like LinkedIn or Facebook on company intranet, we can eliminate the big pile of Category 2 & 3 emails and convert them into “wall posts” or “updates”. This approach would not only eliminate the sizable amount of non-value adding data from the servers but also change our emailing habits.

Counter argument: Lot of organizations have already tried the in-house social media solutions and no benefits have been seen so far. Only few HR guys use this kind of stuff for some events etc. People are very comfortable with the emails because it still retains certain degree of responsibility. Social media on the other hand can make things more casual at work.

Both the arguments are right and certainly there is no best practice available in this space, which brings us to a very important point here. Social Media is successful only if it is being used extensively. Similarly to make the social media successful in an enterprise, we need to have a great behavioral change management strategy. The strategy should consider both top down and bottom up approach. A top down approach can be monitoring the mailing patterns, questioning people who are sending bulk emails to 30+ users at the same time etc. A bottom up approach can be training people, start using social media for Category 3 updates, do pilot runs etc.

It is needless to say that this kind of change is going to take time. And when I say time, I am not talking about days or weeks. I am talking about months and years. But I am quite optimistic that this change is going to survive. The reason is, the younger generation is social media savvy. I did not grow up with Facebook or LinkedIn. In my school and college days, the term social media did not exist. For us, the internet was all about mailing, chatting and browsing. On the other side, the younger generation is growing up with social media. It somehow relates to their way of thinking and dealing with day to day life. Therefore, having social media-like culture at work would be an easy sail for them.

The real behavioral change would be needed for people of my generation and elders (early thirties and beyond). For our generation, social media is mostly about entertainment and information. We need to upgrade ourselves and start smart utilization of social media at work. We need to detach ourselves from the habit of mail trails, reply to all etc. and get into social media style of workplace.

Finally, I would like to say that social media can play a great role in changing or upgrading our work culture (especially emailing habits) in positive manner. IT itself is evolving at a very high velocity and with the new trend of BYOD, an enterprise social media platform has certainly a long way to go.

 Happy Learning

Aditya