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Dr Thomas Jackson
T: 01509 635666
E: T.W.Jackson@lboro.ac.uk
‘You’ve got mail’. These three words are familiar to us all. Every minute in the UK around two million emails are sent – which adds up to almost three billion each day.
But what is the true cost of email to businesses and how can companies ensure staff make the best use of this communication tool? Dr Tom Jackson from Loughborough University’s Department of Information Science has been finding out.
It is hard to imagine life without email. It has become an integral part of our professional and private lives, allowing us to communicate instantly with colleagues, friends and family across the globe. However in the business world, as well as providing a vital means of communication email is also costing companies millions of pounds each year in lost productivity. Dr Tom Jackson – nicknamed ‘Dr Email’ by the media – is helping businesses to educate their staff in how to make the best use of email.
“I first began looking at the impact of email on staff productivity when I was a PhD student at Loughborough,” Dr Jackson explains. “I wanted to investigate if there was an interrupt recovery time for employees receiving email. A study done in 1977 had established that there was an interrupt recovery time for telephone calls, of around ten to 15 minutes, but no work had been done to look at email communication.”
To carry out the research Dr Jackson worked with the Danwood Group, a large UK company that had 500 email users. A selection of employees at the firm were remotely monitored to see how they used email to try and determine what impact it had on their productivity.
“The study concluded that email messages do have a disruptive effect by interrupting the user,” Dr Jackson said. “It found that most employees had their email software check for incoming messages every five minutes and that they responded to the arrival of a new message within six seconds. A recovery time between finishing reading the email and returning to normal work also existed. On average two and a half minutes was spent on each email received, including the interrupt recovery time.”
The study was the first in the world to establish the interrupt recovery time of email and assess the impact it had on staff productivity. On the back of the work Dr Jackson was able to make a number of recommendations to the Danwood Group that would enable more effective and efficient use of email throughout the company. The recommendations included: the introduction of email user training; restricting the use of email-to-all messages; setting up the email application to check for email at no less than every 45 minutes; and encouraging employees to use one line emails.
After completing his PhD Dr Jackson returned to the Danwood Group to conduct further research, this time concentrating on the development of an email user training programme. Initially he sent out an anonymous questionnaire to all staff within the firm who used email. The questionnaire was designed to highlight any inefficiencies or defects in the way that email was being used, and it asked employees to specify how many emails they received on average each day and what proportions of these were irrelevant or unnecessary. Employees also answered questions that related to how they viewed email use within the organisation.
After analysing the questionnaire results Dr Jackson developed an email user training programme, tailored specifically for the firm, to educate staff about email use and best practice. It included information on how to write more precise and clear emails, as well as highlighting the importance of only sending emails to those who need to receive it.
Overall he found that after training, staff found emails they received easier to understand and therefore quicker to deal with, and that fewer unnecessary emails were sent. “This project proved that going back to basics and educating people about the best way to use email increased email efficiency and financially saved this firm thousands of pounds,” Dr Jackson said. “What I now wanted to do was to develop the training so it could be used by other companies and have the same benefits.”
Dr Jackson modified the training programme, creating a course for email users that provided basic but important information about email best practice. Topics covered included ensuring email subject lines were precise and informative, that the carbon copy (cc) function of email was not misused and that emails were kept to a maximum of two paragraphs in length. He then approached 3M Healthcare, Logica and Leicestershire Constabulary to see if he could test out the training package on their staff.
“After training up staff at the different organisations we again found that they were spending less time dealing with email, and were therefore more productive,” Dr Jackson explains. “However we were always concerned that people who undergo training improve in the short term, but then in the long term revert back to old habits. We soon discovered that this was the case.
“It was then that we developed automated email training software. This is installed onto individual machines, plugs into your email system and every time you send an email it passes through the trainer software. It checks each message to see how many people you are sending it to, if there is a subject line, the length of the email and a variety of other factors. If the software spots any potential mistakes in the email, for example if there is no subject line or if the message is ten paragraphs long, then it will send a warning to the sender and some advice on how to improve the email. The sender can then alter the message accordingly or send regardless.”
The trainer software has been piloted at Loughborough University and the results have been incredibly positive, showing a long lasting improvement in email use. It is due to be introduced throughout Leicestershire Constabulary later this year.
For the next phase of his research into email use Dr Jackson is developing an email ‘secretary’ system, which will manage messages as they arrive. The email PA will sort incoming mail, arranging messages by priority and flagging up those that need further action and those that are for information only. The ultimate goal of the system is to try and reduce the impact email has on the working day.
He is also planning a new study looking at email related stress. “Email stress is a big issue for employers – a stressed worker is an unproductive one,” Dr Jackson said. “I want to measure just how stressed people do get by email, what causes the stress and what can be done to alleviate it.” To do this Dr Jackson is looking at ways of automatically and remotely collecting people’s vital signs – such as heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature – as and when they use an email system. One idea is to develop a computer mouse or keyboard that could collect this type of data. Work on this project is due to start later this year.
Dr Jackson’s research has had a profound effect on the way businesses manage email use and has helped many companies and organisations save hundreds of thousands of pounds by increasing staff productivity. Any businesses interested in learning more about his training programmes should email T.W.Jackson@lboro.ac.uk
