Removing Distractions

Information overload is becoming a serious problem and can create on-going distraction and interruption for your employees thus sapping valuable productivity from their day.

Intel has identified this one issue has sapping more energy from their employees than any other single thing and they have decided to do something about it. Other companies are too. Maybe some of their ideas will work for you?

No Email Fridays. That's right, no email on Friday. (watch some of your employees start to twitch as withdrawal symptoms kick-in)

Talk to your Team Morning. Intel has a lot of engineers working away in cubicles. Rather than talking to one another they found that they email to the guy in the next cube. As an experiment, they decided that groups working on the same project are not allowed to email one another in the morning. They have to get up and talk to each other. Now this seems counter intuitive. Email or Instant Message is supposed to make you more efficient. But if team communications are suffering because no one EVER talks, then you've got to make time for talking.

Less Than 5. The less than 5 movement says that if you can't say what you need in less than 5 sentences, you should talk to the person instead of emailing it.

Get creative. If you see that email, IM, web surfing are taking up time and your employees no longer communicate in person, then do something about it. Do it as an experiment. Make it up. Have a no email Friday once a month if every Friday is too much. I'll bet your employees have ideas on how to help trim down interruptive information overload.