Managing the use of Internet and Email Having lived and worked for more than half my life without computers and emails, I have a point of reference for comparison. I am also savvy enough to realize that the genie is out of the bottle. There is no going back. However, I believe humans still have the ability to identify and control the personal and business use of technology in the workplace. I cannot solve the issues of personal use of technology during paid business hours in one article, but I can help you think of some issues to consider when dealing with email to help improve the profitability of your business. Personal phone calls, texting, Instant Messaging, emailing and non-work related Internet use is regularly acknowledged as being an unprofitable use of paid labor hours. Many employees use some of their daily work hours taking advantage of the high speed Internet at work to send and read email, visit YouTube, MySpace or Facebook, shop online, view pornography, play games, improve their Second Life position or just Google their working hours away. Take a moment to calculate the actual cost of your entire staff’s paid labor hours that are consumed by dealing with unsolicited email. Add to that the time personal, non-business related email takes up. Depending on the size of your organization, email can be costing your business thousands of dollars in non-productive time. I view inappropriate use of email and other computer technology as NOT an EMPLOYYEE problem. It is a MANANGEMENT problem. Employees imitate company culture. If everybody else is doing it, so will they. Now is the perfect time to re-evaluate who, when, where, what and how to take back control of personal and business use of email during company time. An easy way to start is to set up appropriate email usage guidelines. Follow through by teaching your employees more effective ways of managing their email. Many employees do not have the proper skills and discipline for managing their email. They do not have the ability to save important emails or to just save an important attachment or photo in another file. Some do not know how to create group (departmental) email addresses for easy dissemination of material worthy of sending to others. Some employees keep everything forever, while others delete important messages that are worth saving. Does your company have a written email usage policy dealing with: P Using business email addresses for personal communication? P How often an employee’s business email should be checked? P When an automatic ‘out of office’ email should be sent as a reply? P Different job duties requiring different levels of email checking? P Allowing / encouraging automatic audio announcement of incoming emails? P Allowing an employee’s personal information to be stored on the company computer? P Personal photographs being downloaded, stored, or sent to business or personal contacts? P How often junk mail and the trash can be checked and deleted? P Unsubscribing to unnecessary, regularly received emails? P Permanently blocking of unwanted email senders? P Identifying and/or regulating social networking, personal shopping, YouTube, Facebook or other non-business appropriate emailed websites? P Active membership in LinkedIn or other business sites. Is this mandatory, encouraged or discouraged? P Attendance of educational Webinars. Is it encouraged, rewarded, tracked, or discouraged? P Automatically emailing shipping notification or freight tracking information? P Routinely sending thank you or follow-up emails to clients? P Using automatic signatures with company name, logo, telephone number, email address, etc.? P Employees creating and using (blind) email groups for fast dissemination of information? Whatever list of email and other technology usage guidelines you put together, make sure all of the members of your staff have the necessary computer skills to follow up on helping their staff implement them. Computer navigation is very easy for those who have acquired the necessary skills. No matter how well your guidelines are written, if there is poor implementation and little or no follow-up, these guidelines will not be followed. Management and employees must buy into the value that is being created through use of your guidelines. Ongoing attention to having everyone follow the guidelines will take supervision, including repercussions if policies are not followed. Common reasons employees ignore email guidelines are they do not know how to set up an automatic signature, group email list or out of office reply. Rather than admit to their lack of skills, they feign forgetfulness, ask another employee to help them, or find a more labor intensive way to accomplish a task that can be automated. Employers can provide printed instructions on easy key stroke shortcuts, or click by click instructions on how to accomplish a requested guideline. I ask my in house staff to learn one new computer skill each week. I challenge each employee to periodically share with me a shortcut or skill they have acquired. If they are able to teach me something new, they receive a poker chip. At the end of the year, the acquired chips can be traded in for worthless (white elephant type) prizes. The idea is a fun way to acknowledge the learning of new abilities. I am also trying to prove that admitting you do not know how to do a specific computer key stroke or skill is nothing to be ashamed of. The use of texting, email reading, and checking one’s social network status is at epidemic proportions. It is also taking up millions of hours of workers’ time. Your customers’ and your profit and loss statements are paying a high price for personal and recreational use of Internet technology during business hours. During this time of high unemployment, currently employed workers are more open to actively taking part in a company’s change of (or enforcement of) a current policy. If the process is internally marketed properly, changing a policy to improve profitability through time management can have a positive effect on your company’s workflow. Create polices and guidelines that will encourage appropriate use of email during business hours. Ronelle Ingram, author of Service With A Smile, also teaches service seminars. She can be reached at ronellei@msn.com