- and if you're a manager you've probably got more than you can
handle
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Dr
Paul Nesbit and Dr Suzan Burton used e-mail to organise their
face to face meeting.
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More than 20 per cent of e-mail messages managers receive are of
little interest to them, according to a new Macquarie University
study that suggests a large and increasing problem with unwanted
e-mail as well as an increase in personal e-mail at work.
Titled Managerial Use of E-mail and Implications for Policy:
A Cross- cultural Comparison, the study by Drs Suzan Burton
and Paul Nesbit, from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management,
examined the e-mail use patterns of managers in Australia and Hong
Kong.
They found that managers in both countries spend well over an hour
each day handling e-mails, with more than 20 per cent of these e-mails
being of little interest to them. The authors describe this as a
worrying trend given that the problem is more acute with senior
managers, whose time is most valuable to the organisation.
Burton says that previous research indicates that 55 to 84 per
cent of workers in different countries report using the Internet
everyday or several times a week. But there have been no comparative
studies of e-mail use, despite cultural differences that could influence
the nature of problems experienced with e-mail communication.
Burton and Nesbit analysed self-reported patterns of e-mail use
by 58 managers in Australia and 45 in Hong Kong, and the trends
in e-mail use within organisations of different sizes. Burton says
that Internet penetration is high in Australia and Hong Kong so
it is appropriate to compare patterns of e-mail use by managers
in the two countries.
"We found no significant differences between the two countries
in the numbers of e-mails received, the frequency of social or direct
selling e-mails received, or the percentage of e-mails which were
seen to be of little interest," she says. "Australian managers,
however, were more likely than Hong Kong managers to send e-mail
outside the organisation, and to use e-mail for individual messages,
rather than sending e-mail to groups of people. Australian organisations
were also more likely to have a formal e-mail policy (64.7 per cent)
than Hong Kong organisations (44 per cent)."
Burton and Nesbit also found that two-thirds (67.9 per cent) of
the e-mail messages managers received came from within the organisation,
indicating the dominant use of e-mail for internal communication.
Other studies have suggested that employees often use e-mail for
personal ends ranging from shopping on-line to running a business
using company resources and time.
"Apart from the time and server resource issues, there is also
the risk of virus transmission from external sources" Nesbit says.
"It is easy for employees to overlook the fact that e-mails sent
using a corporate address or server can be viewed as an official
communication of the organisation."
But, he adds, staff use of e-mail for primarily personal reasons
presents management with the difficult decision of whether to ignore
it, or risk alienating staff by trying to monitor and control individual
use of e-mail.
One way organisations can deal with real or perceived e-mail misuse
is to develop policies, and 56 per cent of the organisations surveyed
had instituted specific policies for e-mail usage although Australian
organisations were significantly more likely to have formal policies.
But according to the report, these organisational e-mail policies
did not usually concern personal use of e-mail. "Policies appeared
to be of two major types," Nesbit explains. "One was to protect
the organisation from legal risk (such as barring pornographic content),
and the other to limit e-mail proliferation (limiting the number
of copies or attachments). Personal use of e-mail was generally
permitted as long as it did not distract from work and otherwise
conformed with all other policies."
There was also some evidence from the study that people from organisations
with an e-mail policy reported a lower percentage of e-mails which
were of little or no interest to them compared to people in an organisation
without an e-mail policy.
Burton and Nesbit accept that the self-reporting nature of their
study was likely to produce a bias towards under-reporting of personal
use of e-mails. "Respondents may be reluctant to report very high
personal use of e-mail during work time, and e-mails with mixed
social and business content were more likely to be reported as primarily
business in content," the report says.
"The high percentage of e-mail which was from within the organisation
supports the evidence that e-mail received by managers at work is
primarily a business communication," Burton explains. "While there
is a significant proportion of e-mail that is social in character,
it is also likely to increase communication within the workplace.
E-mail is increasingly fulfilling the traditional role of the water
cooler in facilitating communication."
And the problem with large amounts of e-mail is also likely to
get worse. The study suggests that senior individuals in large organisations
who had used e-mail for longer periods of time were most likely
to receive larger numbers of e-mail messages.
"Not surprisingly respondents who sent a lot of e-mail tended to
receive a lot of e-mail. Sending more e-mail will typically generate
more responses to which the sender replies, creating new demands
for messages and replies," Burton says.
"We've been looking at patterns in e-mail use for about a year
and as you might expect people are getting more e-mails, the percentage
of direct marketing e-mails is increasing and people are reporting
higher percentages of e-mail that is of little interest to them."
The study also examined the ease at which messages can be misinterpreted.
According to Nesbit, misinterpretation occurs because e-mail lets
the user experience a greater sense of freedom and self-disclosure
than in traditional paper-based communications.
"E-mail disappears from the sender's screen after being sent, and
recipients can easily delete e-mail even before reading the message,"
Nesbit says. "But e-mail can also be stored, presenting the opportunity
for re-reading, reinterpreting and quoting out of context."
"E-mails are often composed in a casual manner. Lack of attention
to message construction can detract from the clarity and meaning
of the communication, and the sender does not have the opportunity
to evaluate how well the message has been understood," the report
says.
Despite its many disadvantages, the contribution of e-mail to the
efficiency and effectiveness of organisational communication is
thought to outweigh its disadvantages. An earlier study indicates
that by 2002 it is expected that e-mail documents will account for
more than 12 per cent of organisational documents (up from nine
per cent in 1999).
"Managers may find that they are receiving more e-mail than they
can respond to while continuing to perform their normal duties,"
Burton says.
Story by Kathy Vozella and Manju Mathew
Photos by Michelle Wilson
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