Sound familiar? Your mailbox is full, and new messages are popping in by the minute. And when you finally find the discipline to clean it up, you can't help but ask yourself why all these people put you on CC. That must have been how Simon Moser from siworks felt when he asked us to develop a dashboard to analyze the e-mail traffic in his group of companies. Learn how he uses business intelligence to encourage and empower his staff to behave more efficiently and to communicate better.
Description
- Title: Email Analyse
- Type: Team Challenge
- Client: siworks AG
- Effort: 3 days
- Data sources: Logfiles of the mail servers, Active Directory
The Problem: too many emails
Simon Moser is a jack-of-all-trades. His group of companies, siworks, consists of four companies in the areas of real estate, fire protection systems and IoT. By skillfully promoting talent, he has delegated responsibility to managing directors to such an extent that he still gets to sleep every now and then. Recently, he has also formally created a structure called the "Unternehmensschmiede Genossenschaft", which allows his companies to benefit from central services such as shared offices, IT infrastructure, or administration and accounting, while the individual companies function strategically largely independently of each other. However, there is one area where Simon Moser is still far from his vision: internal e-mail communication.
Not yet subscribed?
Have you already subscribed to our monthly newsletter, Dashboard of the Month? Month after month, we present a dashboard and share insight on how our customers design smart KPIs, how they set their goals, and how they make sure they reach them by tracking progress in a Power BI dashboard. Not to miss!
The stumbling block was the ever-increasing flood of e-mails across all business sectors and companies. He was faced with a choice: either he spent hours every day reading dozens of e-mails, most of which were completely unimportant to him. Or he deleted the cc-mails indiscriminately and risked missing important information. "I realized that the sender of the e-mail is the only one who can decide which addressee is appropriate in each case." But what to do if the senders steadfastly refuse to accept this responsibility?
The Solution: Power BI Dashboard
First, he tinkered with a KPI, but that turned out to be more difficult then one would think. "I didn't mean to demonize e-mail per se. But how is a KPI supposed to determine whether the recipient is adequate for a given e-mail?"
So, together with Power Partners, we developed a different strategy. In our experience, you don't always need the perfect KPI. It is often enough to give the affected group of employees access to the relevant information. In this case, we built a dashboard that allows us to analyse the email traffic. An intuitive drill functionality allows to break down the mail flow by business line and team.
"The dashboard forces us to discuss which type of organization we want to be, how we communicate with each other & with our customers, and how to improve our processes."
We observe this change in behaviour through insight in information again and again. In the search for the perfect KPI, it is often forgotten that access to the right information is often enough to change the behaviour of groups. Most people are good at interpreting numbers when they understand what the boss is all about.
The Result
And how did that work out? Simon Moser weighs up: "It's still too early for a final assessment. But the first signals are positive across the entire organisation. The dashboard is more than just an eye opener. It's also a conversation opener. The data are - as often – up for interpretation. But that is exactly what is good. "It enables us to discuss which organisation we want to be, how we communicate with each other and with our customers. And how we improve our processes."
Lust auf mehr?
Contact us by phone (+41 44 500 60 30), by mail [email protected] or with this form to learn more about Power Partners, this dashboard or Power BI.
And what surprised him the most? Simon Moser laughs: "What amazed me most was how many mails I send myself. And my mailing list was often too big too!". That's not untypical: as an observer, you can often spot the misconduct of others very accurately, whereas with yourself you turn a blind eye more quickly without noticing it. This effect is also known as actor-observer bias. And in the case of Simon Moser, he promoted above all his understanding of the misconduct of his staff. "One is rarely malicious, but often blind. And that's precisely why it's so important to give employees the right information," he says with a smile before rushing to his next meeting.
Try it out yourself
This is how the dashboard looks:
You can try the interactive dashboard with anonymized data from our fictitious company, Mocca Royal:
