Electronic communication is becoming an integral part of the communication structure within organisations, but the costs and benefits are not being assessed. Communication by email is usually assumed to be an efficient and effective means of sending messages. However, on analysis the process is seen to be much more complex and much less efficient than is normally assumed. Communication is carried out in many different forms, but the common underlying motive of communication is to improve working practices and to increase productivity. As communication pervades nearly everything we do, even small improvements in the effectiveness and cost of our communication processes can have significant benefits. The aim of this research was to analyse the cost effectiveness of using email and to suggest ways in which the cost effectiveness can be improved. A number of studies have been conducted into the cost effectiveness of email within organisations. The studies were carried out mainly at the Danwood Group, the company sponsoring the author's PhD research. The Danwood Group has just over 500 employees at 19 sites around the UK and its head office is based in Lincoln, where all of the email case studies in this thesis where undertaken. The Danwood Group retails office equipment, predominately photocopiers. Email behaviour was monitored by the use of software at the Danwood Group. This raised a number of questions on the ethical issues of electronic monitoring. This thesis explores these issues and proposes a set of guidelines to allow electronic monitoring within strict professional and ethical guidelines. The Danwood Group studies examined how and when email was used. It was found that, when the company first started using email, over two thirds of messages were non-business-related, though this dropped to less than half in a few months. It was also found that many messages could be delivered in one line of text. A one-line message service was introduced and this was found to save employee time for both senders and receivers of the messages. A costing formula was developed measuring the human cost of operating email messaging. The final study was to determine how long it took employees to recover and return to normal work after an email interruption and this was compared with published data for telephone interrupts. From these results a set of guidelines were developed to enable companies to make the most efficient use of email. The thesis concludes by identifying further areas of research into email usage that would help give a better understanding of methods to enable email to become even more cost effective.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:394878 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Jackson, Thomas William |
| Publisher | Loughborough University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/7555 |
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