Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To setup rails on IIS and enable it for multiple Applications. START Server 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 IIS 6 RUBY Install ruby 185_22_rc2.exe You don't have to put it in c:\ruby I created the following folder c:\webdata\ruby, then ran the install. Run install into c:\webdata and say "YES" to deleting the existing ruby directory. During the install I ticked SciTE and Enable RubyGems Took 10mins 1000s of files Ruby GEMS Install Ruby Gems 0.9.1 (don't change it from the defaults) Extract zip file to temp directory, then double click setup.rb, does the default install (about 5mins) Then run at the command line gem pristine --all c:\> gem pristine --all I tried to install Ruby Gems in a particular directory, but couldn't get it working because if you use the command line SET command to put a value into GEM_HOME when the ruby gems installer setup.rb reads the registry it doesn't account for the fact that values in the registry contain double b...
4 comments
Read more

Yammer and puddles

Recently I was asked " What are the top 10 points you think are important to get across to staff at all levels in an organisation about Yammer? " My initial reaction was "Tough ask", mainly because I've seen great write ups on what organisations get out of Yammer but very few that talk directly to the user benefits. Many articles give the usual cop out "users can't see the point, until they get it" I admit I was in that boat when I started using Twitter, a public micro blogging platform. But just like they said "once I used it I got it". What they didn't say was that it took a while and it suits certain people better than others. So as with all things in the social media space, be aware that culture change not the technology may be your biggest challenge. So what does Yammer, a microblogging platform for organisational use , do for real employees that is compelling enough for them to spend the time to "Get it" ? First off Y...
6 comments
Read more

Role Title on profiles

Today one of the people I follow on Twitter asked the following question. @ChristySeason Asking all #intranet tweeps: Does your company publish employees' titles on your employee directory/look up/phone book? In following Intranets Live I've been lucky enough to see some great intranets. As such I was able to reply to Christy with the following Nokia do Deloitte do (see the end of the post) Christy's question also prompted me to document my own intranet's profile page. The following image is from the view other's get of my profile. When I look at my profile I see every item that is recorded. I'll save you from that, another post perhaps, if you're interested. DorjeM PS a couple of Vendors I've been reminded of, thanks Crhis and Carolyn, also have screen shots of their profile pages on the web: ThoughtFarmer - intranet software - slideshow of screen shots and Intranet connections - software solution
2 comments
Read more