In 2000, Pitney Bowes teamed up with the independent nonprofit research group Institute for the Future to measure the number of messages employees receive daily. In Fortune 1000 companies, that number was 168—via phone, e-mail, voice mail, postal mail, interoffice mail, fax and cell phone. That was five years ago; today you'd need to significantly up the e-mail count, and add in instant messaging, SMS, RSS and other new ways to contact employees.
Time Spent Finding Information
Beyond the time spent processing the high volume of messages lies another problem: Employees spend a huge amount of their time looking for information they can’t find, or recreating information that already exists.
IDC, a global provider of market research and advisory services for the information technology and telecommunications industries, wrote about this issue for KM World magazine last year. The numbers they cite are mind-boggling:
"Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90 percent of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists."
Using a hypothetical company that employed 1,000 knowledge workers who earn an average salary plus benefits of US$80,000 a year, IDC calculated that:
"The time spent looking for and not finding information costs our mythical organization a total of US$6 million a year. That doesn't include opportunity costs or the costs of reworking information that exists but can't be located.
"The cost of reworking information because it hasn't been found costs that organization a further US$12 million a year (15 percent of time spent in duplicating existing information)."
Diminished Quality of Thought
IDC points out that there are other wasteful factors that are just as real but impossible to measure. For instance, how much would an organization gain if its employees could spend more time thinking about the business and less time searching for information? How much better would their decisions be if they really understood their company's direction and the marketplace forces that shape it?
There's also new evidence linking information bombardment with decreased ability to think. Hewlett-Packard recently teamed up with the University of London to study the impact of constant information barrage on intelligence. Here’s how HP describes the results:
"In a series of tests carried out by Dr. Glenn Wilson, reader in Personality at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, an average worker's functioning IQ falls ten points when distracted by ringing telephones and incoming e-mails. This drop in IQ is more than double the four-point drop seen following studies on the impact of smoking marijuana."
The Guardian summarized the study more colorfully:
"Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached 'startling' levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that e-mails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.
 "Respondents' minds were all over the place as they faced new questions and challenges every time an e-mail dropped into their inbox. Productivity at work was damaged and the effect on staff who could not resist trying to juggle new messages with existing work was the equivalent, over a day, to the loss of a night's sleep.
"The most damage was done, according to the survey, by the almost complete lack of discipline in handling e-mails. Dr. Wilson and his colleagues found a compulsion to reply to each new message, leading to constant changes of direction which inevitably tired and slowed down the brain."
HP is discouraging "always-on" communication in its own company, and has created a downloadable "Guide to Avoiding Info-Mania" to help others.
The Human Costs
I recently flew from the Midwestern U.S. to Seattle. My seatmate was a recruiter for a high-tech corporation who was under so much stress that she was about ready to resign.
"I spend my life dealing with e-mail," she said. "I shouldn't even take the time to talk with you."
But talk she did. The flow of e-mail was relentless, she said. On a "quiet afternoon," more than 200 messages dropped into her inbox, all clamoring for her attention. She spent much of the flight trying to cope with the latest deluge, knowing that more awaited her when she landed.
Stressed-out employees like my seatmate are not likely to contribute the creativity, innovation, imagination and energy their organizations need to compete. According to Ravi Tangri, founder of Chrysalis Performance Technologies, stress costs the industry over US$300 billion a year in the United States, over CDN$16 billion a year in Canada, and as much as £7.3 billion in the United Kingdom.
In his book StressCosts Stress-Cures, Tangri says stress is responsible for 19 percent of absenteeism, 40 percent of turnover, 55 percent of employee-assistance program costs, and much more.
To what extent does information overload directly fuel stress? In the short term, probably not as much as, say, widespread layoffs. But longer-term, the unrelenting feeling that you can't keep up with the demands for your attention and mind power can take a heavy toll—and doubtless contributes to the high cost of stress.
So how do we reduce stress, curtail interruptions, make information more accessible and free up productivity? There's much more we can do, from helping people better manage incoming messages to changing the behavior of senders to applying alternative technologies.
Communicators need to give this their urgent attention. But until we prove to executives that information overload is a problem that is costing them hard dollars (or pounds, euros, rupees or yen), it's unlikely we'll get the resources to tackle it in any meaningful way.
Bill Boyd, ABC, is communications integrator + principal at Outsource Marketing in Bellevue, Washington. He recently completed a term as president of IABC’s Seattle chapter.
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