What a Year's Worth of Email Can Teach You

Email. A burden. A time-suck. An endless stream of incoming messages, some batted back, some ignored, some discarded, most forgotten. But still a necessary and important tool for getting work done today, two decades after its introduction into our working lives.

And despite dramatic and continuing popularity and value provided by alternate forms of electronic communication, (SMS, social networks, enterprise collaboration technologies), email, for most information workers, remains the dominant digital collaboration and discussion medium. We hate it but we can't live without it. Kind of like Reality TV or Facebook.

But for a tool that is so dominant in many of our professional endeavors, we often have little insight into how we use the tool, and how our usage might be effecting our success, productivity, and career prospects. We know we use email a lot, perhaps even all day long, and we can see how many unread messages we have in our Inbox, but after that, the level of understanding about a communication and work platform is typically extremely limited.

That's why a new service from ToutApp is so interesting, an 'Email Year in Review' report that provides, in a neat little infographic, a rich look into an entire year's worth of email traffic, messages, response rates and more. My full report of Gmail usage from 2011 is here, (a small sample of the full infographic is below).

 

Other sections of the report dig into most frequent correspondents, most commonly emailed 'circles' or groups of recipients, and some interesting chronilogical data around email usage. Did you find that last Spring's project missed its deadline by a few weeks? Could have had at least something to do with a spike in email traffic right around the critical Go-live? Or do you find yourself mainly pushing email all day long, forcing you to do 'real work' late at night or on weekends? If you are like me, you will probably be surprised by at least some of the data from a year's worth of email.

Currently the Email Year in Review is only available for Gmail accounts, so its usefulness for most corporate employees will be limited, but for frequent Gmail users the report is illuminating, and for all of us that are interested in improving performance and collaboration both personally and inside our organizations, the approach to analyzing the data is instructive.

Email is one of those tools and processes that is so familiar, so entrenched, so deeply immersed in our working lives that it can be really hard to look at its use dispassionately, with some perspective, and with an analytical eye. But understanding more about how email might be impacting your success is something many of us should spend some time considering.

If you are a heavy Gmail user, I'd encourage you to request your own custom email analysis report from ToutApp here. You might be surprised at the results.

Socialcast: Collaboration Beyond the Enterprise

Today the enterprise collaboration solutions provider Socialcast (a VMWare company), announced a set of new features to augment and extend the capability in their already impressive collaboration solution. For readers that might not be familiar with Socialcast's solution, it primarily serves as an internal enterprise activity and interest stream, where colleagues can share status updates, links to relevant content, share files, and easily create internal groups organized along organizational or project lines. More recently, Socialcast launched a product called Reach, which gives customers the ability to easily embed and include the core collaboration platform in any number of enterprise systems like ERP, CRM, or other knowledge management platforms, thus taking 'collaboration' closer to the places and systems where the work gets done.

Today's announcement of the new capability that allows enterprises to dynamically create external collaboration groups, and that extends the collaboration platform to an organizations' partners, customers, or even social media fans and followers; is a natural extension of the Reach tool, taking the collaboration environment beyond the walled garden of the internal enterprise, to wherever and with whomever leveraging the platform makes sense.

External Group View - image provided by Socialcast

Beginning today, users of Socialcast can create dynamic groups to invite contractors or suppliers to collaborate on projects, connect more effectively with joint venture partners, or even conduct on the fly customer and follower focus group discussions by simply sharing a link to an external group on Facebook or Twitter, and invite followers to participate. It is a great piece of functionality, and one that attempts to begin to address the more flexible and fluid ways that organizations, teams, and individuals are getting work accomplished today.  

The other interesting feature that Socialcast announced today is a new organizational charting feature that not only can graphically depict the traditional organizational relationships and hierarchy (automatically generated from Active Directory or LDAP), but also can include insight into the external relationships with customers, suppliers, etc. that the organization's employees have developed over time.  This new and hybrid type of an 'extended organization chart' is a novel idea, and one that over time in many organizations could prove to be just as valuable as the traditional, internally facing org. chart.

These new features continue to strengthen Socialcast's position in the enterprise collaboration technology space, an increasingly crowded market where Socialcast competes with offerings from Yammer, Salesforce Chatter, Socialtext, and others.  Where Socialcast appears to have an edge, is in their realization and reaction to the changing ways of task and resource organization in many enterprises, the need for a collaboration solution to support much more flexible methods of collaboration beyond a separate and isolated tool, and with the ease of deployment and administration that allows the solution to take hold rapidly across and outside the enterprise.

I don't write too many 'new product announcement' type posts, because frankly, most of them are not all that interesting. But I have been a fan of the Socialcast platform for a while, have used the collaboration tool in some of my HR Technology classes, and do feel that in a crowded space that Socialcast has consistently had intelligent approaches and ideas to better enable enterprise (and beyond) forms of collaboration.

More and more, success for many organizations will be at least in part determined by how they can best manage and extract value from a disparate, diverse, and fluid ecosystem of internal and external resources, and products and solutions that can help manage and support this new framework offer organizations some clear opportunities and advantages.

You can learn more about Socialcast and today's announcement at www.socialcast.com.

Are you wearing a wire? Tracking Employee Interaction Digitally

These days it seems most organizational leaders have bought in at least conceptually to the idea that improvements in employee collaboration - discovery of ideas, sharing best practices across internal silos, unearthing insights from the far corners of the firm, and so on, is likely to increase in importance and urgency in the coming years, as almost all organizations try to do more work with less people.The Sociometric Badge - no you don't have to tape it on under your shirt

Sure, a raft of technologies have emerged in just the last few years to facilitate and support employee collaboration, (Yammer, Jive, Socialcast, etc.), and while these tools and others like them all have some excellent features and capabilities, they are limited in scope by their digital nature. We can use tools like these to develop, share, track, and interact, and we can measure and report metrics about those interactions, but as systems that rely (mainly), on computer-generated and supported inputs, (individual status updates, shares of a document, group edits of content, etc.), they still miss capturing a key aspect of employee collaboration, namely actual meetings and conversations between peers and in group settings. 

A new approach towards better understanding these 'real-life' employee (and customer) interactions, created by a company called Sociometric Solutions a wearable device called the 'Sociometric Badge' attempts to bridge this gap between analog conversations and digital collaboration tools and data sets by recording and assessing the information captured in a proprietary framework for further analysis and action.

More information about the capability of the Sociometric Badge from the Sociometric Solutions website:

Using a variety of sensors, the Sociometric Badge is capable of, among other things, capturing face-to-face interactions, extracting social signals from speech and body movement, and measuring the proximity and relative location of users.

The process seems pretty straighforward. Turn up at the office in the morning, check your email and voicemail, then just before heading over to the office pantry for a cup of thin, industrial coffee, place the Sociometric Badge around your neck and the badge will begin recording how much you talk (versus how much you listen); it will gauge how much you sit versus how much you move around; and an infrared sensor will track how often you're facing other people also wearing the badges.

After a period of data collection, about a month or two, the folks at Sociometric Solutions will use their analytics platform that combines Sociometric Badges information, e-mail traffic analytics, and other proprietary data collection methods to provide individual and group visualization dashboards. The idea being that these dashboards will provide organizations a more complete view of collaborative behaviors and interactions, than simple monitoring and metrics of purely digital forms of communication like shared wikis, activity streams, or email alone.

Sociometric Solutions points to a case study from Bank of America where that found that call center workers who interacted more with their colleagues felt less stressed, handled calls more quickly, but had equivalent customer approval ratings to those who didn't interact as much. Addtionally, Bank of America scheduled employees' breaks so that they could interact and talk with one another more often throughout the day. 

It is an interesting, if possibly instrusive approach, but one that makes perfect sense that people have been collaboratively solving problems, determining solutions, and generating innovative new breakthoughs for ages by simply talking to each other.

It could be the next great breakthrough in harnessing the collaborative power of the enterprise won't be limited to rolling out the next 'Internal Facebook' tool, it might be simply gaining a better understanding of the informal, verbal, and offline interactions happening all the time.

What do you think? Would you wear a workplace 'wire'?

A Workplace Without Email?

In what I promise will be my last blog post about email, (really, is there anything more tedious? Except of course people who Tweet about phone calls they just had.  So annoying. I mean would you ever have an online Tweet exchange with someone and then call someone else on the phone to let them know you have been tweeting away with the first person, and how 'amazing' they are?  No one cares who you are talking to on the phone. Get over yourself.).

So anyway...

Today I saw the follwing Tweet from Sarah Goodhall (@tribalimpact) on Twitter:

Initriguing, no?  Clicking through to the link mentioned in the Tweet reveals the details of the story:

Atos Origin moves to be email free in three years. Doable?

Atos Origin is an international IT services company, and a very large one, with approximately 50,000 employees worldwide.  It's CEO Thierry Breton has come to the conclusion that email, in its current incarnation and use inside Atos Origin is no longer adequately serving the information sharing, creation, and collaboration needs of the large, far-flung organization.  

He wants Atos Origin to be a 'zero email company' within three years.

Money quote from the  Computer Business Review piece on Atos:

So why the big move? Because email is not helping any more, basically. "The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business, with managers spending between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails... We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. [So] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

Man - first time I have ever seen 'email pollution' compared to filth-belching smokestacks.  But in a way I get it.  Just like industrial pollutants fill the air and waterways, little by little, always more, more, more, our email inboxes never seem to ever truly 'empty'.

More from the CBR article:

Breton argues that social media community platforms and collaboration tools are much superior ways of letting his employees share and keep track of ideas "on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales".

That experience, he says, has prompted him to conclude that "Businesses need to do more of this - email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business." Use of such replacements has already cut email use by up to 20%, claims the firm.

Makes sense - if a reduction of email volume of 20% is seen as a great benefit to the organization, and its harried managers, then why not shoot for 40%, or 70%, or as Atos Origin is going for, an elimination of all internal email.

Can Atos Origin, a 50,000 or so strong organization completely free itself of email in the next three years?  Perhaps.  But there seems to be no doubt if they can succeed, and do indeed see increased productivity, profits, and happiness other organizations will surely try as well.

Need to run, in the 20 minutes it took to write this post, I got about 33 new emails......

Have a great weekend!

Conversation and Being Liked at Work

Last week the popular enterprise microblogging service Yammer, released a new set of features under the name 'Leaderboards'.  With the new 'Leaderboards' capability, organizations that have deployed Yammer to support internal sharing and collaboration will now be able to gain additional insights into what conversations and topics are generating the most activity and interest, which employees are the most engaged on the Yammer platform, and how other employees value and respond to topics and each other.

Some of the metrics that the new feature will provide include:

• Most Liked Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most ‘Likes’
• Most Replied to Members: Top 10 users whose messages have received the most replies
• Members with the Most Posts: Top 10 users with the most public messages posted
• Most Replied to Threads: Top 10 threads with the most replies
• Threads with the Most Participants: Top ten threads with the most participants

A screenshot of the 'Leaderboards' feature is below:

The Leaderboard offers a small, but important step for organizations that have deployed Yammer as an internal messaging and conversation platform. Having a better view into which employees are most active and 'liked', which employees consistently and effectively engage the community with topics and updates that generate interest and dialogue, and what general subjects and conversations drive the most overall response rates across the entire organization, can provide organizational knowledge and insights into the pulse of the enterprise; and the kind of understanding the is often difficult to discern, particularly in large or dispersed organizations.

Looking at active and popular network participants and assessing what topics and conversation threads generate the most activity are valuable inputs that can lead to potential improvements in organizational design, workforce planning and deployment, and even with creation and execution of business strategies.

What users generate the most engagement? Perhaps their roles in the organization may need to be reviewed and enhanced?  Or more likely, the enterprise many need to make sure adequate succession plans exist for these drivers of network engagement?

What topics launch the most conversation?  It could be that senior management needs to do a better job articulating their messaging around these topics, or perhaps more attention needs to be paid to a particular popular or recurring theme.

It used to be that managers and leaders could try and sort out what was really going on at work by hanging out in the lunch room, or the watercooler, or the local bar at Happy Hour. Today though, many of the other informal and serendipitous meetings are taking place virtually, in places like Instant Messaging chats and increasingly, enterprise collaboration networks like Yammer.

Still for many managers and leaders, the value of a platform like Yammer may be hard to quantify, but with the development of tools like the Leaderboard, the 'sell' to these decision makers will continue to get easier. Knowing which employees are most engaged, who is capturing the interest of the most of their colleagues, and what conversations and topics are most resonant with the workforce is the kind of insight that can be incredibly difficult for management to gain.

Even if they spend a lot of time hanging around the lunch room and watercooler.

Of course cynics might say that once employees catch on the the metrics that drive the Leaderboard that they will try to find ways to artificially 'game' the system, to raise their profile and position, but in an online platform, with 100% visibility and attribution of comments and activity, it seems like any reasonably healthy community would sniff that out and put a stop to it rather quickly.

Do you use Yammer, or another similar internal microblogging too?  

Would this kind of insight into network activity help your organization?