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E-mail: Way to Gossip and Waste Time

A survey by MessageGate, Inc. has found that e-mail continues to be the most popular corporate workflow tool but that employees exercise poor judgment in its use, increasing costs and business or legal risks.

Shaun Wolfe, CEO of MessageGate said:

"E-mail has replaced the corporate water cooler as the way to gossip and waste time while on the clock; unfortunately, it's not nearly as visible. If an employee spent hours lingering around the water cooler, everyone would see and somebody would tell them to get back to work. Sitting at a desk and communicating via e-mail is not out of the ordinary, and there is less accountability because the boss can't tell if your e-mails are gossip or work."

MessageGate Activity Profiles (MAPs) provide companies with structured e-mail analysis of inbound, outbound and internal messages. The survey found that whatever the size and scope of the company, similar challenges are faced when dealing with e-mail.

These include:

As little as 20 per cent of internal e-mail may be work-related; the remaining 80 per cent consists of alerts, newsletters, forwards, spam and carbon copies.
Customers frequently include sensitive data (e.g. passwords) in e-mails meaning that companies must be alert to what is included in the reply.
E-mail is often treated like instant messaging and is used for lengthy personal conversations; a particular risk for companies that prohibit instant messaging software.
Employees frequently make accidental financial disclosures (e.g. on pending acquisitions).
Messages including more than three carbon-copied addresses generally are for information only.
Distribution of inappropriate images and videos from work accounts is common. The report points out that these are archived and identify the company source.
Many companies use social security numbers as employee ID and these are widely distributed over e-mail both internally and externally.
A typical internal e-mail is sent to two people on average, resulting in duplication and increased archive and storage costs.
The report argues that sharing these results with employees can increase awareness of relevant policies and practice. E-mail analysis can also reduce operational costs, and improve business processes as well as storage and retention.

Bradley Young, director of services for MessageGate commented:

"Quarterly MAPs are simple and provide a benchmark for companies to monitor and track improvements," said. "As employee awareness around e-mail policy increases, companies can adjust policies as appropriate. Over time, employees become more sophisticated with regards to e-mail and corporate risk and exposure is greatly reduced."

Related article
2003 E-mail Survey Reveals: One in Five Companies Has Fired an Employee for E-mail Abuse
June 24 2003 (Newstream) -- According to a new survey from the American Management Association, Clearswift, and The ePolicy Institute, 22% of companies have terminated an employee for e-mail infractions and e-mail users spend about 25% of the workday on e-mail. Over 1,100 US employers participated in the 2003 E-Mail Survey, a follow-up to an e-mail survey conducted by the American Management Association and ePolicy Institute in 2001.

The survey in detail revealed that 14% of respondents noted that their organization has been ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee e-mail an increase of 5% over 2001, when 9% of respondents reported employee e-mail had been subpoenaed.

The average respondent spends about 107 minutes (1 hour 47 minutes) on e-mail every day ... about 25% of the workday. While 24% report spending less than one hour, 31% spend more than two hours and 8% more than four hours.

76% of respondents say that they have lost time in the last year due to e-mail system problems. 35% estimate they lost only half a day, but 24% think they have lost more than two days.

"E-mail is a great communications tool but not without its shortcomings," said Ivan O'Sullivan, vice president at Clearswift. "These statistics reveal and solidify the idea that companies need to be proactive in understanding how to protect their confidential information assets and train employees how to maximize productive use of e-mail."

"Most employers drop the ball when it comes to educating employees about e-mail risks, rules, and responsibilities," said Nancy Flynn, co-author of E-Mail Rules: A Business Guide to Managing Policies, Security, and Legal Issues for E-Mail and Digital Communication (AMACOM Books 2003) and executive director of The ePolicy Institute, www.ePolicyInstituteChange.com. "While 75% of organizations have written e-mail policies in place, only 48% offer e-policy education to employees, and merely 27% offer e-mail retention/deletion training." said Flynn. On the upside, e-policy training has doubled since 2001, when 24% of companies offered e-policy education to employees.

"It's important for organizations to establish, educate and enforce e-mail policies and rules to control and understand their employee's use of e-mail. The legal issues inherent with use of e-mail are ever present as are the risks of lost productivity both from employee abuse and misuse," said Flynn.

Eighty-six percent of respondents agree that e-mail has made them more efficient, in spite of the fact that 92% receive spam mail at work. Fully 47% say spam constitutes more than 10% of all their e-mail; 7% report spam represents over 50% of all e-mail received.

According to the compiled data, in 2003, more than half (52%) of U.S. companies engage in some form of e-mail monitoring of employees and enforce e-mail policies with discipline or other methods. In fact, 22% of companies have terminated an employee for e-mail infractions.

The use of technology to monitor e-mail and control message content has increased since 2001, when 24% of respondents reported using software to conduct key word or key phrase searches of e-mail and/or computer files. In 2003, over 40% of employers report using software to control written e-mail content. Fully 88% couple software with education.

While 90% of employers have installed software to monitor incoming and outgoing e-mail, only 19% are using technology to monitor internal e-mail among employees.

"Management's failure to check internal e-mail is a potentially costly oversight," says Ivan O'Sullivan, Vice President of survey co-sponsor Clearswift. "Off-the-cuff, casual e-mail conversations among employees are exactly the type of messages that tend to trigger lawsuits, arm prosecutors with damaging evidence, and provide the media with embarrassing real-life disaster stories. The fact that 90% of respondents send and receive personal e-mail at work and 66% of companies lack a policy for deleting nonessential messages, compounds the problem," says O'Sullivan.

Clearswift, provides software that helps companies enforce email policies to stem the tide of email that can pose threats to organizations and slow down networks. Clearswift's products, EnterpriseSuite and MIMEsweeper help companies enforce policies to stop:


Inappropriate email that can lead to legal liability for harassment and discrimination
Loss of confidential information such as customer data, proprietary plans or intellectual property
Loss of network productivity resulting in network downtime from large email attachment, malicious viruses and executables
Lost employee productivity from spam, inappropriate web-surfing and online shopping
The survey was conducted to educate the marketplace on the importance of establishing epolicies, educating employees on the policy and enforcing the policies with software.

Adaptive Corporate Culture

Adaptive Corporate Culture: Key to Financial Performance

A new study of Fortune 500 companies co-sponsored by Crawford International and HR.com shows that those with adaptive corporate cultures and strong leadership practices financially outperform those that do not.

The report, Leadership and Culture, states that only three out of ten strategic change programs produce the business value or financial return that company leaders expect. In a study of the financial performance of 94 large companies from 1995 to 2004, the researchers found that companies that create adaptive corporate cultures outperform companies with non-adaptive cultures by a factor of 900 to 1 as measured by long term net income and stock price growth.

Ric Roi, lead researcher and vice president, Crawford International, said:

"As we worked with corporations over the past 24 years, we came to recognize the importance of corporate culture and strong leadership in supporting business change and transformation. Clients that have an adaptive or agile corporate culture have historically thrived in the face of organizational change while those with non-adaptive cultures suffer through change."

Companies participating in this study reporting high levels of adaptability include 3M, Apple, Bank of America, Cisco Systems, Barclays, BMC, Hewlett Packard, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline and Intuit.

Larry Schnicker, director, HR development operations, Cisco Systems said:

"Cisco's unique and agile culture originates at the top with John Chambers as President and CEO. Cisco's core values have allowed our company to remain very agile in adapting cultural expectations to include the importance of Cisco as a career company, management as a profession, and talent development and movement."

Adaptive companies also tend to be more pioneering as evidenced by Cisco recently being named by Business Week as one of the top 30 most innovative companies in the world.

Debbie McGrath, CEO, HR.com said:

"If more corporations truly measured the value and impact of leadership and culture on their bottom lines, they would invest more in developing leaders and creating high performing cultures, instead of just paying lip service to it. At HR.com, we are committed to helping our 135 000 members share in the research we sponsored with Crawford so they can understand and realize the impact of great leadership and culture."

Corporate Culture and Change

Research by Jennifer A. Howard-Grenville, a University of Oregon management professor in the Lundquist College of Business published in Organization Science and in "Corporate Culture and Environmental Practice: Making Change at a High-Technology Manufacturer" (Edward Elgar Publishing Inc.) considers the "tug of war" that can occur over innovation and argues that knowledge about past initiatives and the business culture of a target group are essential when promoting organizational change.

The findings are based on a nine-month study of a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer (given the pseudonym Chipco) undertaken while the author was a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Located within a group targeting reduction of the organization's detrimental environmental impact, she observed interactions with a larger technology-development group, studied core organizational culture and change and conducted 26 interviews with employees who had been involved in previous issue-selling initiatives with varying degrees of success.

Jennifer Howard-Grenville explained:

"Research in the last 20 years had been based on interviews with successful issue sellers, focusing solely on what they did right. The studies hadn't given the arguments much context. Failures often were overlooked. I found that people who are looking to advance issues in an organization can do so by learning from failures of past efforts and of running up against core organizational culture. If group members learn from earlier experiences, they'll realize how to better craft their argument and portray an issue so that others in the dominant culture will understand what's at stake."

She continued:

"Issue-sellers must understand other people in an organization's various groups, in particular those being targeted to affect change. The way to get savvy is to build alliances, befriend those who know the culture. They may not share your passion or interest, but they may be able to help you understand another group's culture and levels of resistance."

The study found that the environmental group demonstrated a distinctive change in approach in order to get the attention of the technology-development group and gradually began to influence the design of new processes to incorporate concerns about environmental impact.

Jennifer Howard-Grenville commented:

"The issue-selling group wasn't successful until its members recognized that they needed to adapt their arguments to fit the cultural expectations of the technology group by showing and interpreting data in the language of development engineers. Environmental group members demonstrated their confidence by adopting an approach that said: 'You do measurements; we do measurements. Here's our data.' They portrayed their data in the language of the technology group, for example, in terms of equipment efficiency. They didn't just say that we need to pay attention to the environment."

Perception of Consultant Quality Trails That Old Permanent Staff

A recent survey finds that hiring managers are twice as likely to rate their permanent staff as 'excellent' than they rate consultants.

The survey of 899 randomly selected U.S. hiring managers was conducted by Yoh, a unit of Day & Zimmermann. The hiring managers were selected from outside Yoh's customer base. The survey asked respondents to rate the quality of their permanent employees on a report card scale, on grades 'A' for 'excellent' to 'F' for 'failure.' 513 of the hiring managers who used consultants rated their quality on the same scale. The survey found that:

Only 15% of hiring managers rated their consultants as 'excellent.'
Around 30% of respondents rated their permanent employees as 'excellent.'
Almost 58% rated their consultants as 'above average' - 'A' or 'B' grades
83% graded permanent workers as 'A' or 'B' this year - compared to 80% last year.
'D' and 'F' ratings were similar for both groups - 7% for permanent employees, and 8% for consultants.
According to Yoh's press release, a number of factors cause hiring managers to rate their full-time employees higher than consulting staff. For example, a reluctance on the part of many organizations to 'fully invest in or integrate their consulting staff with permanent staff.' Inadequate investment and assimilation may then lead to:

less-than-ideal hires
inefficient teams
a divided work force, and
mediocre output.
Some organizations will move consultants into jobs for which they are not qualified in order to 'retain consulting head-count' - e.g. allocating a software engineer to user support after launching new technology. Yoh state that this 'unfairly sets up consultants to potentially fail in their new role.'

Yoh places consulting and permanent professionals in companies. Yoh's Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Jim Lanzalotto, commented:

"Consulting talent is not a commodity, yet many employers and staffing firms continue to view it that way. Companies stand to achieve optimal results from both consulting and permanent staff if they understand their business needs, communicate those to a capable staffing partner, integrate teams and commit resources to finding and training quality consultants."

STRESS,CANCER and HIV

Stress, Cancer And HIV
A review of research into the relationship between stress and disease commissioned by the Institute of Medicine and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that stress is a contributing factor particularly in triggering or worsening depression, cardiovascular disease and speeding progression of HIV/AIDS. Sheldon Cohen and Denise Janicki-Deverts both from Carnegie Mellon University, together with Gregory E. Miller of the University of British Columbia also considered underlying behavioral and biological mechanisms.

Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty professor of psychology explained:

"The majority of people confronted with even traumatic events remain disease-free. Stress increases your risk of developing disease, but it doesn't mean that just because you are exposed to stressful events, you are going to get sick."

The authors found the strongest evidence came from research on depression, which found stress associated both with onset and relapse of the illness. Social stressors such as divorce and bereavement were particularly significant. They also found that depression is common among people who have been diagnosed with a serious illness and suggest that physical disease itself is stressful and can lead to depression. Chronic stress (such as that experienced at work) was found to contribute to cardiovascular illnesses such as coronary heart disease.

The authors concluded that studies on the relationship between stress and HIV/AIDS have produced less clear findings, but since 2000 have consistently demonstrated an association with progression of AIDS. They suggest this may be a result of complex and demanding drug treatments and could affect compliance. They also noted that autonomic nervous system changes caused by stress may influence virus replication.

The authors commented:

"Individuals differ with regard to rate of progression through the successive phases of HIV infection. Some remain asymptomatic for extended periods and respond well to medical treatment, whereas others progress rapidly to AIDS onset, and suffer numerous complications and opportunistic infections. Stress may account for some of this variability in HIV progression."

The authors suggest two possible pathways for the association between stress and disease: behavioral (such as lack of sleep, exercise, and treatment compliance, poor nutrition, increased smoking) and endocrinal (release of hormones that influence other biological processes, including the immune system).

The authors said:

"Effects of stress on regulation of immune and inflammatory processes have the potential to influence depression, infectious, autoimmune, and coronary artery disease, and at least some (e.g. viral) cancers."

They found inconsistent results in studies of the role of stress in cancer and highlight a number of difficulties in this field: delays in diagnosis; imprecision in measuring progression; an association may only be found in cancers influenced by sustained hormonal response and impaired immunity.

Sheldon Cohen concluded:

"We will need additional studies across a broader range of cancers before we can fairly evaluate the role of stress in cancer."

Cancer Beliefs
A survey of more than 6000 American adults published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention found that a substantial number held fatalistic beliefs about cancer and were more likely to ignore preventive advice concerning exercise, quitting smoking and healthy nutrition. The study analyzed data from the National Cancer Institute's Health Information National Trends Survey, the first for almost 20 years to assess knowledge about and attitudes toward cancer prevention.

Jeff Niederdeppe, Ph.D., professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison said:

"Many Americans seem to feel afraid and helpless in regards to cancer, which may be exacerbated by conflicting news reports and a general lack of education on the causes and prevention of cancer. They say 'well, there is nothing much you can do about it' and, as our survey shows, they indeed do nothing about it."

The survey asked participants for their response to three statements about cancer. About 47 per cent agreed that "It seems like almost everything causes cancer," while 27 per cent agreed that "There's not much people can do to lower their chances of getting cancer." Nearly three quarters (71.5 per cent) agreed that "There are so many recommendations about preventing cancer it's hard to know which ones to follow."

Respondents who held at least one of these beliefs were less likely to exercise weekly and eat five daily servings of fruits and vegetables. Those who believed that "it's hard to know which recommendations to follow" were more likely to smoke. The report explains that all three beliefs were associated with lower levels of education.

The report concludes that there has been little progress in changing the belief that "everything causes cancer" despite increased availability of information over the last 20 years. While not specifically investigating the impact of media coverage on fatalistic beliefs about cancer, the report suggests that constantly changing and sometimes conflicting messages may be contributing to public confusion and what is needed is simple, straightforward education about preventive measures.

Jeff Niederdeppe commented:

"Cancer is a difficult thing to talk about in the space of a single news story. Science values repetition, while the media values novelty. Those two concepts naturally butt heads, which can confuse people."

Work Related Stress and Coronary Heart Disease

New research from Universite Laval's Faculty of Medicine published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has demonstrated that chronic job strain after a first heart attack may double the risk of suffering a second one.

Researchers explain that previous studies had confirmed a relationship between work-related stress and a first coronary heart disease (CHD) event, but the few studies conducted on the association with recurrent CHD were limited in scope and inconsistent in their findings.

Researchers led by Chantal Brisson followed a group of 972 people aged 35 to 59 who had suffered a heart attack. They were interviewed at six weeks, two and six years after returning to work concerning their health, lifestyle, socio-demographic status, and degree of work stress. A job was defined as stressful "if it combined high psychological demands (heavy workload, intense intellectual activity, and important time constraints) and little control over decision-making (lack of autonomy, creativity, and opportunities to use or develop skills)."

The study found that 124 participants suffered a second heart attack and 82 experienced unstable angina. People reporting high levels of work stress at six weeks and two years were twice as likely to suffer another CHD event. Researchers found that the risk remained the same after allowing for variables such as severity of the first heart attack, other health conditions, family history, lifestyle, socio-demographic status, personality, and other work-environment factors. They also found that job strain did not increase the probability of experiencing a second CHD event during the first two years.

Chantal Brisson commented:

"It makes sense on a biomedical level, since the pathological process at the source of the CHD requires some time before it can manifest itself."

The researchers conclude that these findings should alert employers to the need to protect people from potentially harmful situations when they return to work after a heart attack.

Chantal Brisson said:

"Employers and occupational health service professionals must find ways to modify the psychological demands of a job or the level of control over decision-making for people returning to work after a heart attack. It can be done, and encouraging autonomy, creativity, and the development of professional abilities in the workplace is not incompatible with a company's productivity."