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Intranet notifications - are they ruining your organisations performance ?

Photo by mbiebusch
Do you have the option for your staff to receive notifications via email from the intranet ?

If you do these notifications may be stopping your staff from getting a good nights sleep and working at their best the next day.

Christopher Barnes on the Harvard Business Review blog, in his article "workers disengaged",  provides evidence of how damaging late night phone/device checking can be on performance the next day.

So if you're running an intranet and you allow staff to sign up for notifications or updates when changes are made have you optimised the scheduled tasks and cron jobs so that they don't send the notifications out in the middle of the night ?

Sharepoint has this feature allowing people to setup notifications when changes are made to libraries folders and lists they are interested in. Do you modify the jobs so that emails don't go out and disturb everyone's sleep ?

How else do the systems you have setup, which run when the servers are less busy, disturb everyones sleep ?


Comments

Dylan Lee said…
Interesting topic. In a nine-to-five environment (do they exist any more?) I can imagine you could smartly schedule jobs to minimise disruption.

I'm currently working in an environment where a good proportion is 24/7 - and some staff require notification in near realtime, not 7 am the following day.

Not that I'm against the spirit of minimising disruption, but for us we can't look at central job scheduling mechanisms to achieve this. It more a case of educating staff to manage their own devices to minimise their own disruption, weighing up how critical the updates are with how critical sleep is.

January 17, 2014 at 2:37 PM
Dorje McKinnon said…
Dylan,
Firstly apologies for not replying to you sooner.
I could say I had my notifications turned down, way down. In actual fact I've been putting new foundations into my house - so it is me that has been down in a hole, not my notification system.

You make a great point - the modern work environment for many people isn't 9-5.

I think your approach is exactly the right one - staff need to know the appropriate boundaries. Unfortunately often the only way to get around a boss who measures output by who's car is in the car park after 6pm is via policies. And they can be somewhat hard to implement / change.

How have you got on educating staff to minimize disruption and get that all too important sleep ?
Do you have any methods or techniques you could share ?
May 20, 2014 at 11:01 PM
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