05 August 2005
Productivity ploys
Productivity ploys
It's not just the bottleneck aggravation that spam causes, employee efficiency can take a significant hit.
The amount of minute-by-minute so-called 'urgent' e-mails that demand attention drives down worker productivity considerably.
Managing and cleaning up staff e-mail accounts, or even keeping employees productive, is an issue all businesses have to deal with constantly now e-mail is considered an essential practice. E-mail's intrusive, immediate and possibly not work-related nature has led to companies such as Telecom New Zealand to implement no e-mail Fridays . A Hewlett-Packard study early this year reported that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail. Half of the workers surveyed felt they needed to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being happy to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.
According to Frost & Sullivan security analyst James Turner, e-mail for users today is similar to a DDOS attack on a network - packets of information (e-mail) is thrown thick and fast at a user and if they cannot process that information fast enough they fall in a heap.
"The companies that are thinking about their employees are going to start coming up with strategies to make the working day more productive, and that is not squeezing out productivity by responding to e-mails every 30 seconds ... people need thinking time," Turner said.
"Not all companies can implement a no e-mail day because it might not be viable but it is an interesting backlash against the intrusion e-mail has made on working capacity; companies that are doing e-mail packages are watching this and instant messaging with great interest because humans are at a point where they are so busy chatting and typing that they are not doing anything - that is not a sustainable business model." Stricter identity management, including using multiple e-mail addresses for work projects and social agendas, is the area where e-mail can be better managed and therefore create a more organized workflow, Turner said.
While doing without e-mail may not be an option for many companies, clamping down on spam is critical and not just to reclaim bandwidth. Spam has turned as insidious as viruses. Security vendors are starting to see spam used as a mechanism for delivering malicious content in the form of viruses, worms, trojans and the like.
It's not just the bottleneck aggravation that spam causes, employee efficiency can take a significant hit.
The amount of minute-by-minute so-called 'urgent' e-mails that demand attention drives down worker productivity considerably.
Managing and cleaning up staff e-mail accounts, or even keeping employees productive, is an issue all businesses have to deal with constantly now e-mail is considered an essential practice. E-mail's intrusive, immediate and possibly not work-related nature has led to companies such as Telecom New Zealand to implement no e-mail Fridays . A Hewlett-Packard study early this year reported that 62 percent of British adults are addicted to their e-mail. Half of the workers surveyed felt they needed to respond to e-mails immediately or within an hour, and one in five people reported being happy to interrupt a business or social gathering to respond to an e-mail or phone message.
According to Frost & Sullivan security analyst James Turner, e-mail for users today is similar to a DDOS attack on a network - packets of information (e-mail) is thrown thick and fast at a user and if they cannot process that information fast enough they fall in a heap.
"The companies that are thinking about their employees are going to start coming up with strategies to make the working day more productive, and that is not squeezing out productivity by responding to e-mails every 30 seconds ... people need thinking time," Turner said.
"Not all companies can implement a no e-mail day because it might not be viable but it is an interesting backlash against the intrusion e-mail has made on working capacity; companies that are doing e-mail packages are watching this and instant messaging with great interest because humans are at a point where they are so busy chatting and typing that they are not doing anything - that is not a sustainable business model." Stricter identity management, including using multiple e-mail addresses for work projects and social agendas, is the area where e-mail can be better managed and therefore create a more organized workflow, Turner said.
While doing without e-mail may not be an option for many companies, clamping down on spam is critical and not just to reclaim bandwidth. Spam has turned as insidious as viruses. Security vendors are starting to see spam used as a mechanism for delivering malicious content in the form of viruses, worms, trojans and the like.
# posted by vdodon @ 07:48 
