Business
Sunday, July 27, 1997

During a weekly staff meeting, they grumbled about getting more than 100 e-mail messages apiece every day.

``It was becoming too much to handle,'' said Judy Core, human-resources manager. The Garland, Texas, firm put together a task force that came up with guidelines to help ease the load.

Software Spectrum's e-mail headache is shared by many. A recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of managers, professionals and support staffers felt overwhelmed by the volume of messages from all sources. Telephone and voice-mail are still the main culprits, but e-mail is fast catching up, depending on a firm's culture.

New technology isn't replacing more traditional forms of communication, the survey found. It's just adding to the volume, partly because people tend to send the same message in more than one form to make sure it gets through. The upshot: a potential productivity drain from technology that was designed to make work more, rather than less, efficient.

``It's as if the highway was repaved, and so we just put more messages on it,'' said Meredith Fischer, vice president of communications and future strategy for Pitney Bowes, which commissioned the survey and an accompanying study by the Institute for the Future and San Jose (Calif.) State University.

Although enhanced communications have bolstered companies' ability to sell goods and services, ``the backside is the toll this takes on the individual, and . . . the tremendous potential cost'' to organizations, Fischer said.

Joan Brett, assistant professor of organizational behavior and business policy at the Cox Business School of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said e-mail overload frequently came up during consulting sessions she had with area companies.

``Norms about whom you [ send copies to ] have suddenly gone out the door,'' Brett said. ``People don't think they're burdening you, because it's not a piece of paper. What's fascinating is that it's creating a bigger communication problem instead of making it more efficient.''

At Software Spectrum, ``e-mail was so much fun . . . that we'd have a department of 20 sending e-mails all day instead of getting up and talking to each other,'' Core said.

``Now we're saying, `Use the most appropriate form of communication. Why can't you just walk down to the other person's cube and talk to them?' ''

The firm also is installing a newer generation of e-mail technology that will allow employees to better sort messages.

At its best, the growing volume of messages complicates or even lengthens a workday. The worst-case scenario is when overburdened employees simply tune out, said David De Long, research fellow at Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation in Boston.

There was, for instance, the chief financial officer who had 2,000 e-mails waiting when he returned from vacation.

``You know what he did? He deleted them all,'' De Long said. ``Some people think that story's funny. But there are 2,000 messages where someone thought they had communicated, and they didn't.''

Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc. has wrestled with the potential for e-mail overload longer than most. The traffic for the worldwide electronics giant is 1.1 million e-mails a day, said Cindy Johnson, director of TI's office of best practices.

``We've been using e-mail for well onto 20 years,'' said Johnson, who identifies useful knowledge from inside and outside TI, then figures out how best to disseminate it. ``We're very much a written-communication company with a very strong e-mail culture. All that combines in making us a little ahead of the curve in feeling the pain.''

One way her office helps employees cope is by setting up alternate sites for storing and retrieving pertinent but lengthier information. A Web site for employees only, for instance, contains more than 5,000 documents. It receives 10,000 hits a month.

``If you find something really neat, you can go ahead and put it on this depository. If you think you know some people who would have a higher interest in it, you can notify them via e-mail that it's out there,'' said Johnson.

``We talk about `push' environments vs. `pull' environments,'' she added. ``Pull means you seek out information when you need it, driven by business priorities. That's the ultimate dream. But we're often very much in a `push' environment, where that which hits your e-mail is what you look at.''

TI employees use an e-mail browser that lets them set parameters for sorting. Messages from the boss, for instance, could automatically dump into an urgent file.

The firm is looking at a newer tool, called an intelligent agent, that would sort e-mail based on an employee's pattern of handling the messages by content or sender.

At the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide, Morgan Yeates said he handled roughly 50 e-mails, 25 voice-mail messages and ``an inch of paper every day on the in-box'' by keeping his priorities in mind and quickly filtering out messages that need no response.

``You know the old rule only to touch a piece of paper once? It's the same with e-mail,'' said Yeates, regional director of marketing and client relations in the firm's Dallas offices.

Make no mistake about it. Yeates loves e-mail, which permits company employees to talk easily among 90 offices around the world. ``It makes my job real-time, and it makes it exciting,'' he said.

Even so, the growing avalanche has lengthened his workday. ``Generally, I do [ e-mail ] either very early in the morning or from home, at 9 or 10 o'clock after my child has gone to bed,'' he said. ``That way I can respond before somebody else sends me something.

``It's like, `Catch me if you can.' ''

He never lets two days of vacation go by without logging on with his laptop to monitor e-mail, and checking his voice mail.

``I'm sure there are people who would read something like that and think it's obsessive. But the reality is, if I can do a little bit of this, it keeps the ball spinning, and I'm jump-started when I get back.''

Gerald Bennett, marketing director at the Dallas office of the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche, is another e-mail fan, but concedes that ``it's almost gotten out of control in the past year or so.'' So far, Bennett handles it as Yeates does, by getting to the office a half-hour or more before most others.

``If I get there early enough, I can do it before everyone else starts to wake up,'' he said.

The challenge for companies is to reap the benefits without overburdening top employees, said Fischer of Pitney Bowes.

``At the end of the day,'' she said, ``I keep coming back to the fact that this is about people doing business. If we let the process take over from the profitability, something's out of whack.''