Forget the Pentagon's $20,000 screwdriver. We've got $10,00 a day for internal marketing memos (now that's hardcore waste.)

Mar 31, 2001

How often a day do I need to receive emails from some department in the company that basically consist of one sentence of real news and a paragraph or two of congratulating “the marketing team” or “the sales team” or “the implementations team”? Companies are laced with this self-congratulatory bullshit. While you do need to recognize peoples’ hard work, it’s very possible to go too far.

Companies have done studies on how much time their employees waste surfing non-work-related sites on the Internet (to me there almost is no such thing, since I’m a big fan of associative learning…but I still can’t be convinced of the efficacy of examining porn sites for their stunning insights into online usability.) Companies have also intensely scrutinised the time spent on internal procedures, time spent in meetings, and time spent on such details as getting materials to pieceworkers. They’ve done all these studies in the name of cutting out wasted time and motion, all to increase productivity. Good! Great! Now, has anyone done a study on the time spent (and wasted) deleting work-generated e-masturbations? I’d bet the numbers would make even the marketing departments — usually the worst offenders — blanch and swear off the keyboards.

The Breakdown

In an average week at one company, I received, skimmed, and deleted six pieces of mailbox dross. One particular day, I received seven. That didn’t count the other four that had come shuttling down the pipeline during the rest of the week. Since I don’t just delete these messages automatically (the other marketing information-blurbs are written by the same person, so read and look very similar, and I actually need those emails), I spent a total of 30 minutes on that single day, reading and deleting useless email that came from within the company. I was a contractor at that job, so while my takehome pay was one figure, the company was actually paying quite a bit more for every hour of my time. Then there was the post-delete bull sessions: the five minutes per message that we all spent passing around uncomplimentary remarks about the IQ, personal habits, and probable ancestry of the email’s originator. There’s about 10 more minutes of productivity time gone. So far, for one person, that’s up to one hour of dead time. Then there are the other 49 people in the office who also wasted their time — oh, some of them probably actually read it, certainly the VP would file all that away somewhere for use in compiling the annual reviews, and any other members of the originator’s coterie of yes-men would have read it and spent some time in their own version of water-cooler chatter. One hour x 50 people equals 150 man-hours. And keep in mind that this just covers one office of this company (there were six at the time). Add on the 15-30 minutes per message spent on composition, and there’s at least another hour wasted, for a grand total of 151 hours. Care to attach a dollar figure to that? If the average hourly equivalent of all of the people involved in the Great Message Circle was $60.00, that’s 60 x 151 = $9,060.00. The average figure includes contractors, regular workers, the VPs, management, and support personnel for a 50-person office…I might be underestimating the figure, but it’s good enough for illustration purposes. $9,060.00. In one day. That’s kind of sick, it really is.

A Modest Proposal

No, the modest proposal does not state that a marketing manager is indeed a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout [J. Swift]. There is a valid need for marketing managers. No, my proposal is much simpler than that. Just compact all those separate emails down into one weekly missive. Attach it to a company-wide newsletter or memo; or if that just won’t give enough recognition, send it by its lonesome…but just do it once a week. You’ll still get those atta-boys (on which employees do thrive, and marketing wonks seem to subsist) sent out, but instead of having to compose and send — or read and delete — several messages, you do it once. Instead of spending upwards of an hour writing messages that most of the company will deride and delete (in that order), you spend under 30 minutes writing a single message which will have a much better chance of being read and not perceived as another useless piece of bitsam flotsam. Instead of spending an hour processing and then discussing these messages, the time to digest and dissect is cut to 30 minutes tops. You save time, your readers save time. Work smarter. Looking at it from a cost basis, that $9,060 figure would have been cut in half. That would have be an extra $4,500 for operating costs — or buying pizzas every day a month (or more likely, every week for half a year, less if you throw in beer and sodas). More time to spend on getting a quality product put together. More time spent selling said quality product. Or, more likely, concocting more buzzword-laden press releases to try and secure one more round of funding.

Keywords: | work | time management | internal communications |
Posted by Laughing Muse • 595 views • Share this link • Newer • Older