Manage Your Email Before It Manages You

Capital One is an organization that constantly strives to maximize productivity. When internal surveys revealed that email overload was a growing productivity challenge, Capital One's Productivity Team took action.

Solution

The Capital One Productivity Team partnered with Cohesive Knowledge Solutions, Inc., a Whitewater Group partner, to develop a groundbreaking email efficiency workshop. The Capital One Productivity Team played a major role in shaping the program.

Capital One has earned a sterling reputation for innovation, customer service and leadership in the diversified financial services sector. Capital One manages $103 billion in assets for more than 50 million customers worldwide.

In response to internal surveys, Capital One's Productivity Team isolated email as a major opportunity to increase productivity. Associates reported that email was consuming more than 30 percent of their workday. Internal surveys reflected growing concerns relating to the quality and quantity of email.

Approach

Capital One's Productivity Team, led by Matt Koch, director of productivity and knowledge management, made the bold decision to design an email productivity training solution with the following principles in mind:

Grounded by data – Partnering with CKS, Capital One gathered as much information as possible via focus groups, surveys, external research, etc.

Customize and target solution – The workshop objectives were carefully tailored to reflect the exact needs of Capital One associates. Capital One survey data was incorporated into the workshop to gain added buy-in from participants.

Fit the solution to the culture – Capital One has a corporate culture that expects excellence while always doing the right thing by the customer, the associate and the company. The workshop was designed to resonate with these core values.

Apply intellectual rigor – Actual results were measured carefully against workshop goals and a pre-intervention baseline survey to validate participants' 75-minute time investment in the email productivity workshop. Two thousand surveys containing more than 100,000 individual question responses were collected and analyzed.

Workshop Content

The powerful email efficiency workshop contained a series of engaging exercises, best practices and tools that helped participants improve the overall value of email.

Associates learned:

• How to send fewer email messages
• How to create clear, concise and actionable email
• How to coach others to become more proficient at email

Results

Two months after training, a follow-up survey revealed that:

Email decreased by 21 percent – Associates reported a 21 percent reduction in total email sent. There was also a 10 percent reduction in email received, which demonstrates that the Send Less-Get Less concept works in the real world. Participants also reported a 23 percent drop in the time they spent processing email.

Email quality improved by 51 percent – Associates reported an impressive 51 percent increase in email quality over baseline. Clear, concise and actionable email naturally helps associates accomplish more in less time.

More than 11 days saved – Associates reported that they were on track to save 11.3 days per year on average. This figure did not take into account dramatic improvements in email quality, which are likely to have further decreased email processing time.

Leadership gains – The workshop helped to empower associates to take control of the email environment via Info-Coaching.

One year post-training survey metrics – A post training survey was conducted one year later to determine if results could be sustained over time. The findings were extremely positive:

• 88 percent continued to leverage workshop best practices
• 83 percent would recommend the workshop to all associates
• 80 percent believed that the workshop made them more productive
• 77 percent indicated that they continued to apply coaching principles gained in the workshop

Conclusion

The Capital One Productivity Team did an excellent job of diagnosing and addressing a growing productivity challenge — email overload. They partnered with Cohesive Knowledge Solutions to develop a highly effective, breakthrough-learning experience that resulted in major time savings, improved productivity and a better work/life balance for associates. Results were sustained throughout the year and beyond.

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