Take Control of Workday Interruptions

Next time you spend the whole day at your desk but feel as though you got nothing done, don't worry, you're not alone. Interruptions consume 28 percent of a typical knowledge worker's day, according to New York-based research and advisory firm, Basex. That translates to an approximate cost of $588 billion in the United States alone, according to the company.

The pervasiveness of email, the Internet, mobile phones and wireless connections continue to reshape how we work. Organizations are geographically distributed. People can work from just about anywhere and at all times, whether they're at a customer site, in the home office, on the train, in the car or sitting in a coffee shop. The always-on nature of work has allowed organizations to create greater business value, better serve customers and stay competitive.

At the same time, work/life boundaries have blurred. Now, you can work from home and keep an eye on the dogs, or take an early morning conference call over breakfast. For those working across international time zones, this level of flexibility is essential, even if it sometimes feels as though you're never done working. Knowledge workers' jobs are by nature collaborative, and the ability to use email, phone calls, instant messaging and face-to-face meetings to get information and make accurate decisions is a lifeline. But it can also lead to information overload and distractions that prevent us from focusing on the task at hand as we're faced with other "priorities."

People choose their preferred communication method depending on their situation and preference. Preferences may be generational: More senior professionals may prefer to pick up the phone to solve an issue, while recent college grads may dash off a quick IM as the first line of communication.

However, the preferred communication method isn't always the best. Choosing the best communication method for the task at hand allows workers to reduce interruptions and complete their tasks more quickly, but deciding which mode is "best" can be tricky in an era when 30 percent of calls go to voicemail and people—and spam filters—deal with hundreds of emails a day.

Using Presence to Regain Control
"Adding contextual information about a person's status, or presence, helps workers make informed decisions about how best to communicate," said Laurent Dinard, senior product manager at ShoreTel. "Presence status gives workers control over how others communicate with them, so they can minimize distractions and make accurate, responsive decisions. With presence, you can avoid wasting time." Workers miss fewer calls and have less email to deal with, so they can focus on their real "work" with minimal distractions and ensure customers get their questions answered and problems resolved more quickly.

Coworkers who are not physically in the same location but whose work requires frequent interaction find presence status particularly useful. Quite simply, workers become aware of each other's immediate availability, and decide how and when to communicate.

ShoreTel fully integrates presence status with unified communications to makes it brilliantly simple to take advantage of presence status. ShoreTel Call Manager blends phone and IM presence so that users can add a contact and see their status—it's easy to see whether a person is on the phone (either an office phone or mobile phone), available by IM, or not available at all.

In case of the latter, ShoreTel lets you receive an alert when the person's become available. An alert is triggered, for instance, when the user hangs up his call placed via his ShoreTel Mobile Call Manager.

"Expanding presence awareness to the mobile device is key. When an expert leaves the office to get in his car for instance, the system uses GPS or Bluetooth technology to automatically reflect that he's out of the office," Dinard explained. "When he returns to the office, his status changes back."

Customer support and contact centers can also leverage presence information to locate available subject-matter experts to escalate issues so that customer problems are resolved more quickly. An agent can not only locate the right person to solve the customer issue, but know that he is available before transferring the call.

To learn how ShoreTel Call Manager and presence information can help your employees get control of interruptions and reclaim productive work time, visit our Web site or request a demo today.