Digital Work Habits: Research Report Contents Executive Summary..........................................................2 Methodology......................................................................3 Findings: Who Responded................................................3 Email Work Styles.............................................................4 Email Risks........................................................................7 Other Digital Habits...........................................................8 Conclusions and Recommendations.................................9 Appendix...........................................................................11

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

Executive Summary Back in 2010, Microsoft reported there were approximately one billion Outlook installations worldwide.i It’s not news that email is the hub of the digital work environment. However, it’s easy to overlook that email is a collaboration tool – the go-to platform for communicating and coordinating with co-workers, partners, and customers. Email can be a powerful productivity booster, but it can also be a time sink, a source of embarrassment if misused, or at worst, a security risk. Email and other collaboration tools in the workplace are also a topic for serious study. One of the key findings in this area is that our ability to quickly connect with others has led to a new style of work. According to London School of Economics Professor of Sociology Judy Wajcman, work in the digital office could be characterized as highly interrupted. But as she delved more deeply she noticed that “people have actually integrated all these technologies into their work processes … and organized their work in particular ways. They didn‘t use the concept of interruptions. They just thought this is how they do their work now.” ii In the spirit of Wajcman, we decided to learn about email usage in the digital office. Not only did we survey metrics—daily email volumes, time spent managing emails—but we were also interested in understanding the user behaviors surrounding emails. Our survey bears out Wajcman’s overall assessment. Almost 45% of those surveyed are receiving between 50 and 300 emails per day. While emails are now an established part of our work, at some point even Wajcman understands they become an interruption. The survey shows that 20% are immersed in their inbox between 30 and 60 minutes, and another 16% are spending over an hour per day, or more than five hours per week, organizing emails. Time spent searching, categorizing, and deleting email on a daily basis is time taken away from the work that email is supposed to be enabling. Has this interrupted work style led to an increase in communication mishaps—more accidental reply-alls or internal emails seen by clients or an email meant for a coworker sent to the CEO? Our findings indicate that email miscommunications are not an unusual occurrence: 62% reported some kind of damaging email being sent. While the consequences varied, the most common result reported was embarrassment of the parties involved in email exchange (64%). However, there were more serious outcomes, including job loss (12%) and even compliance violations (6%).

Digital Work Habits: Research Report Methodology In September of 2012, Varonis published an 11-question survey, which was distributed to IT personnel and security staff. We received 127 responses from 92 different organizations. The survey was constructed to: • Measure the daily email volume employees receive • Assess how workers manage their email, and how much time they spend doing this • Determine the frequency and severity of email mistakes • Understand how employees handle other digital distractions at work Findings: Who Responded

In categorizing the responses, the sample was almost evenly split between small-to-medium sized businesses (typically defined to be fewer than 1000 employees) and the enterprise environment. We received a wide range of job titles—from CEO to IT analysts and everything in between. To simplify our analysis we organized titles into three broad categories: C-level, Manager, and Employee. Not surprisingly, more than 90% of survey responders came from the Manager and Employee categories—this should be kept in mind when reviewing the results.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

Overall managers and employees are heavily engaged with their emails. About 45% receive between 50 and 300 emails per day and another 17% are in the 100-300 message bucket. There’s even an email elite being bombarded with over 300 daily emails. Our repsondents are also conscientous about reading their email. About 14% claimed there are no unread emails in their inbox. And another 23% have fewer than 10 unread emails.

How much time is all this taking? The largest segment, or 44%, are spending up to 30 minutes per day taming and managing their emails. With this email-centric sample, we’re not surprised that over 20% are spending up to 1 hour and sizeable minority (16%) are focused on managing their inboxes more than one hour per day. Email Work Styles One question we wanted to look at is whether there is a relationship between job title and email volumes. Wajcman has conjectured that our digital work habits have been influenced by a flattening in organizational structure so that both managers and their groups are tasked with greater workload and the emails that come with this. To explore this, we categorized all the job titles into C-level, Manager, and Employee. We were especially interested in comparing Employees against Managers. Our results show the Employee’s daily email volume is skewed towards the higher end, with more than 25% receiving over 100 emails per day. The Manager group is a little more even-keeled with a mere 6% experiencing over 100 emails per day and a little over half dealing with a manageable 50 – 100. A statistical test for independence between Employee and Manager indicates there’s some evidence for saying these two groups have different email patterns.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

It is possible to interpret our results as validating Wajcman’s insights about some non-managers having taken over tasks from other employees. Email volumes are a signature of their growing responsibilities as their network of contacts has expanded. C-levels are clearly immersed in their email. Our sample size for this statistic is small, but over one-third reported receiving over 100 emails per day. But it is not surprising that CEOs will see email extremes: as the hub in an email chain, a disproportionate number of emails should naturally land in the CEO’s inbox. We also tried to pin down the organizational habits of email users. Respondents were asked to classify themselves as filers (they leave a clean inbox), hoarders (never delete, but file and tag), mixture (some filing and some hoarding), and out-of-control (given up on organizing). Over 34% of those surveyed—the filers—are emptying their email on a daily basis (after reading them, of course). The hoarders make up 19% of the survey group. Around 40% are a hybrid of both patterns. And there was a small but telling niche of 6% that has admitted to completely giving up on managing their inboxes. We

undertook

comparing

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analysis

time

spent

on emails between the three derived job categories. After testing for independence, we are on firmer statistical ground in saying that Employees and Managers share similar time profiles. At the extreme end, between 13% and 20% of both groups report spending more than 1 hour managing their emails. And they share similar percentages in the 30-60 minute rate: 22% of Employees, and 25% of managers.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

This suggests Wajcman’s point that email is simply part of the work culture, not just an interruption, even at the top of the corporate hierarchy. To validate this view, one only has to look at the C-level group. Although the sample size is small, it’s still revealing that executive suite is reporting spending over 1 hour per day managing and organizing emails. We also wanted to look at daily email volumes against company size. We see similar profiles in the SMB range, and into the lower end of the enterprise space. It further validates that email is as much a part of the office environment as cube walls and furniture. Another way to break down the time spent on email is to view it through the lens of the different organizing classifications – filers, hoarders, hybrids, and out-of-control. We compared these categories against the time spent on emails. The most revealing pattern is in the group that has “given up” on their emails. It’s characterized by extremes: almost 30% spend over an hour managing and organizing, and approximately 60% spend under 5 minutes. Perhaps they spend a few minutes looking for a specific subject line and then give up, or else for an important email, they spend hours searching? For the other categories it’s clear that investing in some email management pays off in terms of reducing time spent in the inbox.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

In trying to understand whether employees were applying any technologies to help organize and manage emails, we asked about the use of automatic rules. The results were not encouraging: more than 80% had few or no automatic procedures to handle their inbox. Email management for most remains a time-intensive and hands-on activity. Finally, we were curious about who was in the “Inbox Zero” club—i.e., those reporting fewer than 10 unread emails in their inbox. Again, we’re not surprised that the Employee and Manager categories share a similar profile. The email-focused C-level group, however, did reveal there were a few CEOs who couldn’t keep up with their daily email volumes.

Email Risks With email now a permanent part of our work routines, there’s always a danger of misuse and other risks. We asked “what was the most damaging email someone from your company has sent by mistake?” The answers came back in free form text. For anyone who has ever hit reply-all by accident—most of us, I suspect— many of the answers will not be surprising. Here are a few representative responses: • Inappropriate jokes • Email intended for one person sent to another • Internal communications accidentally sent to clients • Long cc list of email addresses that should have been placed in bcc

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

As we might expect based on our own experiences, mistakes with email addressing and other messaging mishaps are not uncommon. About 62% of our sample responded with a story about an email accident. And as we also might have guessed, the consequences were typically limited to embarrassment: 64% reporting that one or more parties were embarrassed by an errant email. There were more serious outcomes, however, including job loss (even at the CEO level), confidentially breaches, compliance issues, and even an incident of a corporate fine.

Other Digital Habits As a final question, we wanted to briefly explore how workers are using their internet connection for non-worked related activities. Almost one-third reported they had no such use for the web; 43% scan web sites for news; 8.5% reported being addicted to Facebook; and 2% reported downloading or streaming music from web sites.

The survey conforms with the popular cultural view of the Web as an on-line meeting and entertainment resource—the digital equivalent of a virtual coffee break with on-line friends. For some, it is an additional source of interruption.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

Conclusions and Recommendations We agree with Professor Wajcman’s view that email has become a vital part of the way we work. But it’s clear that at some point high email volumes can affect productivity, and email mistakes can lead to potential legal and compliance issues affecting the entire organization. The survey reveals that large daily incoming email traffic is a pattern seen across different sized companies and different job categories -- there’s no escaping the email onslaught. The bigger challenge is how to best to use and manage emails, and reduce risks associated with email correspondence. Some could simply decide not to keep pace with email since it is, for many, a losing race. For those who do run this race, queuing theory has bad news: unless you can service emails in less time than the inter-arrival periods on average, you’ll end up with a very, very long queue of backlogged messages. For practical purposes, assuming you’re one of the 17% in the 100 email per day club, you’ll have to run a below-five minute sprint per email. A different viewpoint comes to us by way of the call center world. They’ve had a global writable inbox, called an 800 number, for far longer than email addresses have been around. But the telecom industry has evolved and developed different techniques, some of them transferable to the data messaging environment, to speed overall throughput while also improving the waiting experience. Wajcman‘s ideas on filtering are especially relevant here. Call centers use “skills-based” or expert routing to direct incoming connections to the appropriate resource. A similar routing concept could be applied to emails, guiding messages to the right endpoint based on scanning content and subject lines. In fact, this is an approach taken by help and support desk email ticketing software. The question is whether these specialized routing techniques will migrate into general enterprise email platforms. Perhaps with even more sophisticated intelligence, a real-time dashboard could be embedded in the client app, display the delay time for sendees to expect based on their current unanswered emails, schedules, and to-do tasks. In other words, email servers may need to provide the equivalent of a call center’s message-on-hold—perhaps showing their position numbers after employees hit the send key. There are short-term solutions that have been taken up by some companies. Employees can broadcast an “email bankruptcy” notice to force co-workers to resend what is likely the most important content. Other organizations have been experimenting with an email blackout one day a week, wherein workers communicate using other means—either phone calls or perhaps an antiquated “house call”.

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

Finally, here are a few quick tips that may help your email experience today: • Before clicking on send, create and follow a checklist – especially if the email is in any way sensitive • Verify contact in the to:, cc:, and bcc: fields • Check the subject line for errors and typos (spell check doesn’t always work there) • Verify that attachments are the documents you wish others to read • Do you really want to hit send? • If you’re not using automatic rules to filter and route emails, you should be • Learn Outlook’s query syntax to narrow down email searches. For example, “to:Jane” lists all emails sent to Jane • Experiment with turning off audible and visible email notifications, or limiting them to VIPs, and then check email on your own schedule

i

About that 1 billion Microsoft Office figure …, ZDNet (2010)

ii

Executive Leadership and Innovation Interview: Professor Judy Wajcman Discusses the Sociology of Technology and the

Work-Life Balance , Gartner, Inc. (2011)

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

Appendix The following charts show the survey results for questions not presented in the body of the report:

Digital Work Habits: Research Report

ABOUT VARONIS SYSTEMS Varonis is the leader in unstructured and semi-structured data governance software. Based on patented technology and a highly accurate analytics engine, Varonis solutions give organizations total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times from all devices, all use is monitored, and abuse is flagged. Varonis makes digital collaboration secure, effortless and efficient so that people can create and share content easily with whom they must, and organizations can be confident their content is protected and managed efficiently. Voted one of the «Fast 50 Reader Favorites» on FastCompany.com, and winner of the SC Magazine Innovation, Product or Service of the Year, and Best Network Security Awards, Varonis has more than 4,500 installations worldwide and is headquartered in New York, with regional offices in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Varonis, the Varonis logo, DatAdvantage®, DataPrivilege® and the IDU Classification Framework® are registered trademarks of Varonis® Systems in the United States and/or other countries and Metadata Framework™, DatAnywhere™, and Data Transport Engine™ are under a registration process in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.

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