As many of you probably read, John Caudwell, CEO of the UK phone retailer phones4u, recently banned the use of internal email across his company (from CNN.com: Firm bans e-mail at work ). Caudwell discovered that his employees were not solving customer problems as quickly as they once had and he attributed this deceleration to unnecessary email shackling employees to their computers.
Based on his informal research, Caudwell figured that his employees spent three hours per day on unnecessary email, which equated to $1.6 million per month. The majority of this email was not spam or personal—it was from inside the company and related to customer accounts. Rather than picking up the telephone or walking down the hall to ask a question, employees emailed each other and then had to wait at their computer for the response.
Now, is Caudwell’s reaction a bit extreme? Maybe. Do we all get caught up in this email game on a regular basis? Probably. Does it cost us time away from your internal clients, external clients, or direct reports? Surely. So, extreme? Maybe. But definitely not unreasonable when you think of the time we all spend crafting and proof reading email and waiting for responses to our strategically developed (and often unread) messages (when we could get a quick answer by standing up or lifting the telephone receiver).
We see this situation almost everywhere we go, and many of our clients surely smiled when they read about Caudwell’s reactions…the scenario and Caudwell’s retort confirm two pieces of our advice perfectly…
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When clients ask “What really communicates?” here’s our response (with the channels listed in descending order of their communicative potential):
* Policy Decisions
* Reward & Recognition Systems
* What’s Being Said by Opinion Leaders in Informal Networks
… and last of all,
* Formal Internal Communications
Our general advice: if you want to send a message, make a policy decision or change what you measure and reward. It appears the US government is slowly trying to apply this lesson, based on this Federal Times report: Is Merit Pay Worth the Risk? Experts Say Yes — If Agencies Get It Right. Unfortunately, members of Congress aren’t so certain the government can pull it off. From the article:
“Before the federal government can establish a true pay-for-performance system, we must ensure that a valid performance-management system exists,” said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, a leading voice for government reform in Congress.
Voinovich and other lawmakers have argued in hearings that merit-pay systems are good in principle but difficult to design well. If designed and carried out poorly, they argue, merit-pay systems could create work forces that are embittered, demoralized and undermined rather than motivated, well-focused and high-performing …
… In short, there are many critical ingredients that make a merit-pay system successful, experts say: well-planned incentives, performance goals and performance measures, fairness, buy-in from employees and managers, good communications, training for managers, effective internal grievance procedures, and money.
Of course, we’re a bit befuddled by the concern, given that most publicly-traded companies have used merit pay systems for decades. Nonetheless, this issue is an excellent example of an organization attempting to change cultural priorities and behavior by communicating through policy decisions, and is worth watching as an emerging case study.
This likely confirms your suspicions: Research in the UK suggests that only one in ten UK workers instant message at work for work. Read more here at PCPro. (Also of note: the PCPro site you’ll visit is using a weblog medium.)
