Information Overload V: A JIT Coaching solution
posted by Nathan Zeldes on November 14, 2006
A controversial question: You want to stop harmful behaviors like poor email etiquette in the organization. Can you educate your users to do what’s good for them?
There are two views:
- If you educate them, they will do the right thing and the problem will go away.
- If you only educate them, enough of them won’t do it, thus keeping the problem alive.
I am of the second camp. I firmly believe, a belief reinforced by observation of numerous behavior change campaigns, that education is crucial – but needs to be reinforced by something that gently (or not so gently) makes it harder to succumb to temptation. This is where “First Generation” solutions begin to morph into the Second Generation.
This concept is key when trying to remove sender behaviors that harm the recipient but not the sender. If you want to discourage the abuse of Reply to All, educate your users why it’s a bad idea – but help them avoid mistakes (whether deliberate or accidental) by making the system reject messages with too many recipients, or at least alert the sender – perhaps like this?
OK, just kidding… but this would be acceptable:
In 2001 I had Intel IT develop this concept into a tool, the “Intel Email Effectiveness Coach”, which ran in the background on the client, and when the user clicked Send examined the message and raised a gentle alert if an etiquette error was about to be committed. We put much effort into making the tool’s advice agreeable (we all remember the cautionary tale of “Clippy”), and gave users the option to check “Don’t make this suggestion in future messages”, and the ability to set their own thresholds for the trigger criteria. The tool responded to any of a dozen triggers – for example, using a blank subject line, attempting to “Reply to all” to over 12 people at once, replying to a message that has a long “tail” of previous replies, forgetting to attach the attachments the one had intended to send, etc. Users’ reaction was quite positive – in our pilot testing 93% of participants recommended the tool be made a standard across Intel.
One advantage of this approach is that the coaching it gives is the ultimate in “Just in Time” training – you only get a nudge when you try to send a message with a problem; far more efficient than going to a training class that may include stuff you’ll never need, and other stuff you’ll need after you’ve forgotten the training altogether.
We’ve posted the IEEC externally on ITshareNet.org, where you can download it here. We’ve used it for some years, as have some other companies; and we’re working now on a major upgrade – so stay tuned!
Comments (5)
tagged: coaching, email, infoglut, infomania, information overload, training
Comments
Nov 21 | Brad Lauster said:
Hi Nathan. I’m glad to see that the Intel Email Effectiveness Coach lives on. You may not remember me, but I was the Interaction Designer for the IEEC. In fact, it was one of the last things I designed before I left Intel in 2001. I’m glad to see my design was flexible enough to allow it be used and extended all these years.
Looking back on the design, there are definitely some things I would do differently now, such as find a better way to deal with all the 0% efficient dialog boxes, but I think the tool’s longevity is a testament to the quality of the design, given the technology we had to work with at the time.
Thanks for the post and please keep in touch!
Nov 21 | Bill "Prune" Wickart said:
Hear, hear! I’ve run into this problem dozens of times over my years in high-tech and in the “real world”. I really like your proactive messages; I’ll bet they go a long way to solving that one problem, and the principle does a lot of good overall.
Often, it takes only 5%-15% of the community not following a BKM to sink it as an entrenched part of the culture (work environment). Then we get the borderline adopters deciding it’s not worth it to follow the BKM. Finally, new people come into the work environment; if they see a written policy, they don’t believe it’s really accepted, because they see so many violations.
One of the critical parts of the training is to give each participant a true feeling of empowerment: the concept that, if you do or do not change your work habit, it will make a difference. For many work changes (such as email habits), this includes “mutual co-presence”: each of us knows that everyone else got trained, too, and we’re all going to change our work habit together. This group change will make our work more effective.
This usually means getting everyone changed to the new habit within a very short period of time, and then reinforcing the change ASAP with examples of positive use. For instance, at the water cooler: “Hey, Marv — I saw your email about the XYZ problem. It’s out of my area, so thanks for getting me out of the loop after the first email. How did it come out?”
I’ve seen all too many change attempts (some of them my own) that lacked mutual co-presence and follow-up, and died because the people needed to implement it didn’t believe it could work.
On the other hand, I’ve seen several that got follow-up and worked well, including better code reviews in my current work group.
Nov 21 | Nathan Zeldes said:
Thanks Bill. I definitely agree with your analysis of the role of role modeling and group consciousness of the change. You see my implementation of that in our YourTime program (see my earlier postings in this series); though I believe the best solutions will combine the social part with some technology enforcement, as described in this article.
Nov 21 | steven e. streight aka vaspers the grate said:
Email abuse is a huge and dangerous problem at many companies. But the managers are weak and afraid to “offend” the abusers.
For example:
A person who works at an insurance company tells me that many employees who never get any business emails, feel left out of the exciting arena of email activity.
So, to be included in email adventures, they will send everybody stupid, frivolous joke emails and superstitious chain mail “forward this to 5 other people or you’ll be cursed” type messages.
My opinion? The managers need to get some you know whats and stop them. But alas, no guts, no real professionalism in this regard.
Mar 04 | Paul Talbot said:
Hi Nathan, I have read your documentation with interest as out email system is approaching crisis point
Is it still possible to get a download of the software? The link above doesn’t work.
Cheers, Paul