Employees are spending increasing amounts of time handling email, time that may detract from their primary role within an organization. As such, business researchers have repeatedly raised concerns about email overload, constant interruptions, technology addiction, attention deficiency and productivity loss. And that doesn’t take into account social media and social bookmarking sites like twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.

Now, Ashish Gupta at Minnesota State University Moorhead, and Ramesh Sharda at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, have developed a computer model, SIMONE (Simulator for Interruptions and Message Overload in Network Environments) that analyzes how email flows within a network of knowledge workers and could offer coping mechanisms for controlling information overload and interruptions.

“Email has become the most prevalent mode of business communication and information exchange within organizations,” Gupta says, “and has changed the way we spend our time at work.” It provides cost-effective information sharing but also has a downside. Gupta and colleagues have employed SIMONE in a series of tests and devised ways to improve email efficiency based on the results.

“Our results are of immense practical significance for enterprises of all scales,” Gupta told me, “If a knowledge worker allows for continuous email interruptions, an enterprise may lose anywhere between 4-5% of the working day.” This loss can be gradually reduced to less than 1%, if scheduled email processing strategies are used, he says.

Although these time savings may not appear to be of much significance when viewed from an individual knowledge worker’s perspective, they accumulate into a significantly bigger numbers when seen from the organization’s overarching perspective.

For example, an organization having 100 employees could potentially lose up to 2333 work hours per year with a continuous email processing strategy (C), 1000 work hours with a four times a day email processing strategy (C4), and approximately 300 hours with once a day strategy (C1).

Assuming an hourly wage of $50, following a continuous strategy produces an annual loss of approximately $600,000, $260,000 with a C4 strategy and $80,000 with a C1 strategy. For an organization having 10,000 employees, use of C strategy could lead to a loss of 233,333 work hours translating into an annual loss of approximately $60 million.

With a C4 strategy, about 100,000 work hours are lost resulting in the loss of approximately $26 million per year, whereas, a C1 strategy leads to approximately 300,000 lost hours, which is equivalent to roughly $8 million per year assuming the wage rate of $50 per hour. “A strategy of scheduled e-mail hours such as C4 could save this company about $34 million per year as compared to the continuous e-mail checking approach that is commonplace,” Gupta says.

Gupta and his colleagues are now conducting more advanced research to understand email use in the workplace and planning other experimental studies focusing on more intrusive technologies such as instant messaging. “This will hopefully improve the overall productivity of organizations by helping knowledge workers change poor information processing practices,” he says. In times of economic recession what a difference an email makes.

Ashish Gupta, Ramesh Sharda (2008). SIMONE: A Simulator for Interruptions and Message Overload in Network Environments Int. J. Simulation and Process Modelling, 4 (3/4), 237-247