by Charles Plant | Aug 23, 2011 | Management
It’s no wonder that the average employee is overwhelmed. If you look at technological advances in the last 30 years alone, we have gone from getting phone calls and letters and a bit of data to getting:
- Data
- Voice Mail
- Email
- Instant messages
- Text messages
- Facebook Messages
- Tweats
We have gone from reading the newspaper, listening to radio and watching TV for our news to:
- Websites
- Blogs
- Videos on YouTube
- Pictures on Flickr
Where we once used a phone to communicate, we now use
- Cell Phones
- Blackberries
- IPhones
- IPads
- Computers
If you put together the statistics on the average user who uses these devices and for the most part these are the younger employees for communications alone and not including media or data, the average user sends or gets:
- 110 Emails
- 53 Instant messages
- 80 Text Messages
- 100 Facebook posts
The email alone is enough to swamp an average employee but when you add in all of the websites, blogs, tweats, videos etc, it is a wonder that we have any time left to work.
by Charles Plant | Jun 23, 2011 | Management
According to statistics from AOL’s Corporate Newsroom in their 45th (?) Annual Email Addiction Survey in 2009, 62% of at-work email users check work email over the weekend, and 19% check it five or more times in a weekend. More than 50% said they check it on vacation, with the highest amount coming from mobile device users at 78%. In another AOL Opinion Research Study in 2007, they reported that:
- 15% of Americans say they are addicted to email.
- 59% of those using portable devices check email as it arrives.
- 43% of users sleep near their email unit to hear incoming messages.
- 40% consider email accessibility when they plan a trip.
- 83% check their email once a day while on vacation.
- 43% check their email first thing every morning.
Statistics published by the Radacati group state that the typical corporate email user sends and receives about 110 emails per day. This breaks down into 74 email messages received, 61 of which are legitimate and 13 of which are spam. The average number of emails sent is about 36. Being a bit of a nerd, I went and looked at my own email usage over the last six months and found that on average I sent 25 a day. Because of the way I file emails, I was unable to figure out how many I received but I was able to determine that I deleted 67 per day on average. This means that 67 emails were not important enough for me to save them in folders that I set up for all projects I am working on. Given the total volume I could count, of 92 emails per day, it is likely that I am working at the average of about 110 per day.
Oddly enough 110 emails per day does not sound like all that much. Could you imagine though if you got 110 letters in the mail each day or you got 110 phone calls in a day. You would be absolutely swamped. And guess what? Many of these email users are actually swamped.
by Charles Plant | Jun 7, 2011 | Management
The industrial revolution changed the way work was done in the same way that the technology revolution is changing work today. The old cottage system of work migrated to larger units of production, particularly as the availability of centralized power made it possible to work on a larger scale. Not only did the nature of the enterprise change but the entire support structure of work was modified as a result. The need for significantly larger amounts of capital to support the new scale of industry changed the worlds of banking, insurance, exporting.
This new format of working changed the lives of workers forever. The craftsman working in his cottage making blankets, sweaters, hats or working as a blacksmith on iron could no longer survive as a result of increased competition and lower prices. This cottage worker now had to either step up and become an employer and owner of one of the factories or as was more common, become a wage slave in one of the factories. While in luxury goods, there was still a very hands on element and cottage style workers merely migrated to a new location where they did much of the same work as they had before, the introduction of powered machines radically changed the organization of job functions from the old handicraft tradition.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776) described the new production system in a pin factory:
“One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pin is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is in this manner divided into about 18 distinct operations.” According to Smith, a single worker “could scarce, perhaps with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make 20.” The new methods enabled a pin factory to turn out as many as 4,800 pins a day.”
by Charles Plant | Apr 7, 2011 | Management
When you come right down to it, the way we work is very similar to the way people worked in the pre-industrialized middle ages. While we don’t call it Feudalism anymore, the effect is quite the same. Feudalism in its heyday was the exchange of land for military service. The feudal lords (equivalent to today’s private equity investors) granted land rights to the landed gentry (entrepreneurs and business owners). The landed gentry in turn granted land rights to peasants (middle managers) who in turn employed serfs (front line workers).
The work of a peasant or craftsperson was probably very enjoyable, particularly if you account for the fact that you can’t be farming crops in the winter. If you accept what Malcolm Gladwell said about the work of rice farmers there are many parallels. He held that rice farming was actually a very enjoyable pursuit because it was meaningful. There was a clear relationship between effort and reward so that the harder and more intelligently you work, the more you prosper. Secondly, the work is complex in that there are numerous factors that need to be balanced and calculated to be successful. Finally the work was autonomous, you could pretty much do what you wanted, when you wanted. Hard work yes, but very meaningful.
Today’s peasants (middle managers) though don’t have quite as enjoyable a life as peasants did under feudalism. What we have lost in the move from feudalism is this sense of autonomy and the direct linkage between effort, results, and rewards.
