News
Aimed at improving business productivity….
MSUM PROF DEVELOPS SIMULATION MODEL
TO DEAL WITH EMAIL OVERLOAD, INTERRUPTIONS
Whether your email alert is a simple “ping” or “doink,” or a customized wave sound like “Hey, buddy, you’ve got mail,” for some people the urge to respond is as addictive as heroin.
It’s equivalent to yelling “incoming” in trench warfare, but instead of ducking, you reach for your mouse.
Like a phone call, you gotta answer it. It could be important. A family emergency, an urgent request from your boss, you’ve won the lottery?
More likely, it’s not.
Unfortunately, that addictive behavior can cost businesses millions of dollars in wasted, lost and diverted employee productivity, according to Ashish Gupta, an operations management professor in MSUM’s School of Business.
A specialist in email management, information overload and social networking, Gupta says it’s no secret that employees are spending an increasing amount of time handling email, time that may detract from their actual jobs. And the main culprits are information overload and interruptions.
Business researchers, he said, have been concerned about this problem for years.
Gupta has a common sense solution: managers could improve email efficiency simply by scheduling specific email processing times across an organization.
This approach, he said, avoids the inherent distraction of continual email interruptions throughout the workday, allowing employees to focus on what they’re paid to do. It also removes pressure on employees, who often feel obliged to check and respond to emails.
The results suggest that a business might want to process emails one to four times a day as the best strategy. It depends.
Gupta and his colleague Ramesh Sharda, a professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Oklahoma State University, have carried out an array of tests on email flow within organizations with the help of a computer model they developed called SIMONE, an acronym for Simulator for Interruptions and Message Overload in Network Environments. (A simulator is a software program that mimics the reality, but in an artificial computer environment.) Their research was published in the recent issue of the International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling.
That article prompted a spate of media requests, ranging from Farfo Forum, Local TV news, Minnesota Public Radio, CNN Radio to a French Web site on innovation called L’Atelier, along with several prominent national newspapers and media outlets in India.
The practical results of their study, especially for large companies, can be dramatic, Gupta said. Using the SIMONE simulator, they found that a business with 100 employees that doesn’t control email flow could lose up to 5 percent of its productivity per year. They found that a worker can lose about 28 minutes a day on email interruptions.
At an average hourly wage of $50 per hour, he said, that translates into a loss of $600,000 a year. The bigger the business, the bigger the loss.
But that same company, if it adopts a controlled email strategy, could gradually drop that nonproductive email time to under 1%.
SIMONE does take urgent emails into consideration. The two professors are now trying to develop models that use semantic technologies (specific words) to identify urgent messages.
Gupta said SIMONE is currently set up to analyze custom scenarios for specific businesses and organizations, and can suggest an optimal or near optimal email processing strategy.
“In the future,” he said, “we would like to make SIMONE behave like an intelligent agent that can guide a worker in processing or scheduling emails on the fly.”
For Gupta and his colleague, this is just the first step in attempting to reduce the interruptions and information overloads created by email, which, ironically, was initially created to improve productivity and efficiency in communications.
They are also conducting several studies to understand the use of instant messaging, text messaging and other web 2.0 technologies at workplace.