If it feels as though messaging-related data has gotten the better of you, it has.
If you manage these systems for your organization, you must consider which of the recent proliferation of hardware, software, platforms and apps your employees should be using. And you must decide this at many levels, from basic internal employee PC e-mail access to the mobile apps used by claims adjusters or sales reps in the field. From security and productivity standpoints, other questions arise: Who should have access to what data? How much time is lost by employees just processing the hundreds of messages that appear in their inboxes each morning?
In the past, only doctors, nurses, police and fire personnel were required to be constantly "on call." Now, most American workers are all on call, using their "out of office" function in a futile effort to manage expectations. At most insurance customer service centers, e-mails must be answered within 24 hours. Many insurers also consider e-mail messaging an internal customer service tool. Ignore at your peril.
In "The Tyranny of E-mail," John Freeman cites estimates from 2007 that the average corporate worker spends more than 40% of his or her day sending and receiving some two hundred e-mail messages. That was more than three years ago. Today, your employees are interrupted every 15 to 20 seconds by a blip on the screen, usually by a request for a response from an internal or external stakeholder.
All told, if employees are spending up to 50% of their work day scanning and responding to online messages, how productive can they be?
And what are we doing about it? We're enabling it. We hit "reply all," drawing others into indirect discussion when the message could be succinctly routed to the sender only. We ask ridiculous, time-wasting social questions, such as "how are you," in body copy of e-mails that deal specifically with business issues. Then we answer similar ridiculous questions with a return e-mail. Our eyes dart back to the monitor, hoping to keep up.
Insurance technologists need to do more to help employees make sense of this digital deluge. While many aftermarket technologies exist, a simpler solution may simply be educating employees about the robust, rules-based message management and filtering options already included in programs such as Microsoft Outlook. While this may do little to cut down on the overall volume of messages, it will considerably reduce the time employees spend manually sifting through their inbox, dragging and dropping messages into various folders.
If technology ultimately fails to address the problem of messaging overload, our industry may just need an intervention. I'll start: My name is Pat and I'm an e-mail addict. Now let's talk about social networking...
