It’s an unusual day around here if someone hasn’t called asking for help with a mailbox that has reached its size limit. Such calls are as common as the cold, but they’re hardly seasonal.
Try teaching organization tips when a deadline is looming or has passed. It’s futile.
And if there’s one thing that can arrest productivity, it’s a full mailbox. (For an interesting look at e-mail’s ill-effect on employee output, read “Avoiding Death by E-mail” written by Tom L. Barnett and published on Computerworld.com.)
Depending on your company’s policy, it can mean an inability to send mail at best, and loss of all e-mail functionality at worst.
Usually, the calls come from users who need to send an e-mail right now, and do not have time to properly free up space. Sometimes they have already begun mass-deleting and they still cannot send mail.
In these situations, callers don’t want to hear about smart mailbox organization. They just want to get their work done on time.
Usually, our consultants offer the caller a solution that solves the pressing issue, and then they may follow up later with a phone call to show him how to archive and organize mail so that the problem does not happen again. (Try teaching organization tips when a deadline is looming or has passed. It’s futile.)
For that caller, his issue is resolved, and, if he set up archiving and created mailbox rules, he most likely will not have the problem again. That’s wonderful. But for every caller who reaches out, there are many more who spend hours whittling down their mailboxes, only to face the same problem again in a week or two.
If e-mail is the dominant form of communication at most businesses, why is it not standard practice to train employees on e-mail software?
It’s amazing what 20 minutes of learning and a little bit of follow-up support will return in the form of increased productivity.
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