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Clogged inboxes are an enterprise-scale problem

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Business cycles are speeding up, yet businesses seem to be slowing down.

So here’s something to ponder: For decades, businesses have focused on their processes, using techniques like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints to reduce process cycle time while improving quality and reducing incremental costs.

Making products flow off an assembly line is nice. But assembly-line-like processes aren’t what slow a business down. It’s the inability to make fast, accurate decisions and act on them that gives so many businesses the appearance of a swimmer immersed in molasses.

Last week’s KJR discussed some of the particulars, with suggestions for speeding up decision-making by reducing committee-induced decision sclerosis.

But committees aren’t the only source of business slowdown. As a CFO of my acquaintance phrased the cure for another one, “Pick up the damned phone!”

Back in the days of Mad Men the cycle time for interoffice memos was measured in days. It started with hand-written or dictated text, handed to a secretary or sorted and transported by the mailroom staff on a (typically) twice-a-day schedule to the typing pool.

After a couple of edits, transports, and re-typings, the memo made its way to its intended recipient or recipients. The process took, in total, several days from initial dictation to final delivery.

Email replaced this with a process that took, in total, several minutes at most, while reducing the need for administrative assistants and typists at the same time.

Strangely, the committees that made decisions about such things back then didn’t jump on the new technology, yelling to IT, “How fast can we have this — the checkbook is open!” Go figure.

Anyway, everyone knows clogged email inboxes are a problem. But the ramifications of this indicator of email’s success go far beyond reductions of personal effectiveness.

Email has slowly slid from business accelerator to decision-bottleneck.

The cycle time for any process includes intrinsic cycle time, also known as touch time, and queue time. For email, touch time is how long opening a received email, reading it, clicking or tapping on the Reply button, typing your own message, and clicking or tapping on Send takes. Queue time is how long an email sits in your inbox before you open it.

When email was first introduced it shortened both of these compared to interoffice mail. Queue time has been lengthening ever since. Email has become a victim of its own success.

Compounding the felony is this: The distribution of interoffice memos was subject to the limitations of carbon paper, or the time and expense needed to make copies, added to which was the time and effort needed to fold the paper, insert it into interoffice mail envelopes, and address the envelopes.

With email there’s little burden associated with making sure it’s sent to everyone who ought to know about its contents. This isn’t something to stop, either. Sharing information with everyone who ought to know about it is a virtue, not a bad habit.

But, all these cc’s do add more clog to already overstuffed inboxes. For some folks, the time needed just to decide which ones to actually read and do something about has extended from a glance, to minutes, to, over the course of a busy day, as long as maybe an hour.

Or else, the messages that have scrolled down far enough are ignored entirely until the sender becomes frustrated enough to either re-send the original message or to pick up the damned telephone.

But I oversimplified, because if this was the total impact of queue time, it would be a livable problem.

Here’s why it counts as a major source of business decision slowdown: Queue time has to be totaled over all the messages in an email thread. In total, cumulative queue time can result in multi-day delays when reaching even simple decisions.

What’s to be done?

Picking up the damned telephone is hardly a cure-all: You’re more likely to reach voicemail than your target, and voicemails take longer to process than emails.

What telephone conversations will do is eliminate most of an email thread’s queue time: Instead of hitting the Reply button you converse.

Use your calendar system to schedule the call and attach whatever background material is essential, so you don’t just replace exchanging voicemails for exchanging emails.

One more thing: The organization as a whole has to find an alternative to cc-ing everyone who ought to know about something. This is far from easy. As a stopgap, consider installing Outlook with a default rule that yanks every email for which the recipient is on the cc-list and stashes it in a separate “cc for review” folder.

It ain’t pretty. But sometimes, less ugly will just have to do.

Comments (9)

  • Again, you’ve hit the nail on the head! Coincidentally, in a recent Fortune article on why business decision-making is slowing down, I read: The rise of collaborative tools..has created an environment in which 60 percent of employees must consult with at least 10 colleagues each day just to get their job done. Scarier, half of that 60 percent need to engage more than 20 to do their work. A graphic shows that average time to deliver new IT project has gone from 8.5 months in 2010 to 10 months in 2015.

  • I agree! However, people are no longer adept at verbal conversation. They retain very little of what they hear, or often remember only what they want to hear. But your point is clear – the old ways sometimes remain best. Solve problems by conversations. I too suffer from the SPAM-loaded email inbox. Remember that the original software for email was called “CC Mail”? I try to NOT cc everyone. Also why is the default response in most people’s email software set to “Reply All”?

  • At one time in the 90’s there was a tech corporation that used an acronym of letters as their moniker that attempted to address the problem for intraoffice messages. Email was cut off at 8am, on at lunchtime and off again until 5. If you needed to interact with a coworker in the HQ building you had to pick up the phone or get up and go to the other person’s office and discuss. Prompted by the CEO recognizing 3-4 hours of his time spent on email daily.

  • Some years ago, AAA lost me as a customer when they kept sending me renewal notices by mail. Eventually, I looked at the price and thought, “Surely, there’s a cheaper way to get the same coverage?” I took the time to call my insurance company, and wow… $2 for towing!

    Had AAA called me, which they did later, I probably would have given them my credit card number without thinking.

    Today, I take those AAA Logos that come in the mail and stick them to every planner and notebook I use. The message-to-self is, “Pick up the phone and TALK, woman!” It works.

  • Yes, clogged inboxes are a real problem. A few observations.

    1. Back in the paper memo days, things were even worse than you describe, because only very important memos were duplicated and delivered in parallel. In my company, most memos were distributed by a routing list. Sometimes a memo got stuck on somebody’s desk and it took weeks to get to you. This, of course, was only used to distribute information—not to make decisions. That would’ve been impossible.

    2. One of the problems with using email to distribute information to get decisions is that a lot of people do most of their email reading on SmartPhones. Opening up Excel attachments isn’t really an option in such cases. So they see your email, and probably make a mental note to check it out when they get back to their laptop, but too often they get busy and your email slides down to the end of their queue.

    3. In addition to scheduling a call, you can schedule a short meeting to get all of the decision makers together. With tools like LiveMeeting, people can be geographically distributed and this still works.

    4. Another very good option is Microsoft Communicator. We use this a lot to cut through the email clutter and get quick answers. Communicator shows whether or not people are available at their computers.

  • Case in point: the KJR email arrived at midnight, but I only got to it 15:45, a full eight hours into my workday.

    How about chat? At my large enterprise we rely on it, creating rooms on the fly for critical issues and initiating conversations in real time without getting shunted to voice mail.

    It’s a secret prioritization sauce, too. Want something done ahead of the pack? Send me an instant message. They’re much harder to ignore or defer than email or voicemail.

  • Since the first rule of any bureaucracy is CYA, and phone calls eliminate the paper trail necessary to CYA, replacing email with phone calls is a non-starter.

  • I agree with everything you wrote. The concern I have is that your thoughts will only be considered by people who already agree with you. In particular, when you said,

    “But assembly-line-like processes aren’t what slow a business down. It’s the inability to make fast, accurate decisions and act on them that gives so many businesses the appearance of a swimmer immersed in molasses.”

    I wondered if there was any metric or analytic process a manager could use to objectively demonstrate this point? Sometimes hard numbers can open ears, where common sense and experience don’t.

  • I agree with Ray regarding email being better suited for CYA than phone calls. That goes for IM’ing too. Yes, you can save the text of the IM, but unlike for email, it is more cumbersome to organize them into threads and/or store them in subject-matter-titled mailbox folders.

    Also, there is the “pure documentation” aspect of using email as opposed to the “CYA documentation”. CYA proves who said what and when, pure doc email can also be stored (with attachments if desired) that contain work instructions and or reference materials. Yes, same material could be stored/shared in a file repository on a share drive or in the cloud, but that takes extra steps.

    Heck, based on an email’s title/sender we can set up create-once, use-many-times rules to help manage email. I just verified that Outlook (2013 at least) allows you to simply point and click to create rules that include triggering criteria distinctions between emails with you in the To box vs. the CC box.

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