Every Customer Interaction is a Moment of Truth (MOT). Whether it’s person to person, person to system, system to person, system to system or person to product they are all Causes of Work.

That work in dealing with MOT’s creates organizational internal handoffs, what we call Breakpoints. Places where things can and do go wrong and again we see them happening between people, systems and services all the time.

All our internal communications are in fact Breakpoints. For instance how many emails do you receive from colleagues and business partners daily?

According to US research firm The Radicati Group, individual workers sent an average of 37 e-mails a day in 2006 with predictions this will rise to 47 by the end of this year.

A further study conducted by researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Paisley in Scotland found that one third of users felt overloaded and stressed by the heavy volume of e-mail they had to deal with.

When e-mail behaviour was tracked it is was found that many were checking their inbox as often as 30 to 40 times per hour.

“There was a mismatch between how often people thought they looked at their inbox and how often they actually did it,” said Mario Hare, a lecturer at the University of Paisley.
With those facts in mind Intel has become the latest in an increasingly long line of companies to launch a so-called ‘no e-mail day’.

On Fridays, 150 of its engineers revert to more old-fashioned means of communication. Engineers are encouraged to talk to each other face to face or pick up the phone rather than rely on e-mail. In Intel’s case the push to examine breakpoints followed a comment from chief executive Paul Otellini criticising engineers “who sit two cubicles apart sending an e-mail rather than get up and talk”.

Energy-draining monster

I am not convinced that switching e-mail off is the answer to stress and lack of productivity in the office. We really need to get to grip with the causes of work – the Moments of Truth and begin to engineer those away. Back as far as the 1980’s Jan Carlson at Scandinavian Airlines realised that and drove out lots of wasteful time consuming activity which in turn result in lots of ineffective and needless internal communication.

Alan Elliot, director of business development of e-mail specialists Mirapoint agrees and says “Depicting e-mail as some kind of resource-draining monster that we’d all be better off without willfully ignores the realities of the modern business world.”

By truly fixing the Causes of Work, rather than messing around with the Effects (a bit like moving the chairs on the deck of the Titanic) we will all find our customers and employees life simpler, easier and more successful.

So how many Causes of Work have you eradicated today?

What is your SCO and how aligned is your organization to achieving it?
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