In today’s business environment, we have fax machines, telephones, mobile telephones, car phones, FedEx, snail mail, and of course email. With all these methods for transferring information, there sure is a lot of knowledge changing hands. But is that always a good thing? A company called Basex has made itself a leading authority on a problem of modern times: information overload. It’s website offers a methodology for pinpointing opportunities to reduce the actual amount of information you receive for the sake of greater efficiency.
One of the points that basex makes is that a great deal of the information getting sent out these days is redundant. But how do these redundancies get created and perpetuated? Usually it is a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, and you know what that means: management! Strong central management and wise delegation of tasks will prevent such information overload when it is a matter of a parent company sending facts and figures out to its subordinates or affiliates. Another problem that causes duplication is that of different departments organizing information in different ways. While the sales office may list its clients alphabetically on a database, the marketing office may view this same information in value order on a spreadsheet. Again, it comes down to management determining how information will be stored and sorted and ensuring that is consistent company-wide.
One of the most prevalent reasons any company begins to drown in information overload is simply the fact that workers at affiliated companies tend to believe that more is better. Never wanting to be blamed for failing to share crucial information, low-level employees pass on every scrap and shred of knowledge that comes across their desks, as if they were police detectives using microfibers to solve a mysterious crime. The recipients end up with inboxes full of nonessential information that must be sifted through in order to find the information that is actually important.
To deter employees from exacerbating the problem of information overload, managers must rein them in with strong information training. Administrative-level employees must know what information, if any, they should pass on from what they receive. At the same time, analysts and IT workers must be judicious as to how much unnecessary information they put into the system. Since most information starts in their departments, it is important to keep an eye on how much is getting printed out. Usually those printouts are redundant or may even go unread. So anything that is automatically being printed should go to a print-on-request status. This will allow company executives to actually know what items are being read and analyzed and what items are not completing the cycle through the business office.
By cutting out the overloaded information, managers will save their employees time and trouble and force more attention onto the actual pertinent information. They will steer workers toward accomplishing stated goals and away from slogging through digital debris. Information overload, in today’s day and age, can be a serious hazard to the smooth operation of any business, whether small or large, so if you are having productivity problems it may be wise to look at how much unnecessary messaging is being done in your office.
Tags: do you have information overload, how to prevent information overload, information overload and your business, what is information overload
