Ken Gartner filling in.

Rumors, urban myths, scams and other undesirable communiques have a remarkably long shelf life on the Internet. Periodically they get ‘rediscovered’ and disseminated as if they were hot news, worthy of everyone’s immediate interest. When this happens with an inflammatory email broadcast widely in a business environment, the results are, sadly, quite predictable. The message and its ensuing forwards and replies take on a viral spike initially, and periodically latecomers to the party add their 2 cents to reignite outrage, flame wars and general ill-will among the populace. Email takes rumor mongering and kvetching at the corporate water cooler to a new extreme.

Not only can there be legal consequences for not squelching such inappropriate workplace ‘harassment’, but there is also a direct productivity cost. In this case, the cost does not stem from overuse of disk or network resources as would be the case if large photos and videos were passed around to large email distribution lists. Instead the cost is borne as time wasted by employees reading and replying to the message from their mail clients.

To get a rough idea of the lost productivity, let’s model the time spent reading and replying and then bill that time at nominal wages. A simplifying assumption might be that it takes 1 minute to read 1KB worth of text. The original email was 2.5KB in size. If initially sent to a corporate wide mailing list of 1,000 people and half the people actually read it, that represents about 1,250 minutes. The first incendiary Reply-to-All is guaranteed to up readership (including some folks re-reading the original text as well as the new inciteful annotations helpfully provided by the sender). It might not be unreasonable to assume that as much as 10,000 minutes of business time could be racked up before this fizzled of its own accord.  If the tally were 150 hours, at $30 per hour for information workers, that would contribute $4,500 to lost productivity.

What steps can be taken to nip such problems at the source? Enforcing email policy to limit access to broad corporate mail distribution lists is one way popular with large institutions that try to limit damage from employees wishing to publicly air their grievances.

Enforcing limits on the number of recipients in a ‘Reply’ email is another business best practice. Natural language content inspection can help identify suspect mails in real time, but never underestimate the importance of simple keyword checkers that can be quickly deployed to effectively block a ‘blossoming’ email thread from propagating further.

By implementing reasonable collaboration policy enforcement to prevent a single email sender from taking corporate resources hostage, everyone benefits.

Technorati Tags: email cost, email hoax

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