Monitoring e-mail use in the name of science

The cost of e-mail interruption is an interesting paper that attempts to gauge the imact of answering e-mail on worker productivity:

"Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected."

To be honest, what I found as interesting as the conclusion was how the researchers collected their data:

"It was important that the Danwood Group employees did not know they were being monitored as this could have affected the results of this interrupt study."

So the researchers used WinVNC - after modifying the client to remove its telltale system-tray icon - and then had to convince management that it shouldn't get copies of all the recorded information:

"This concept is a hard one to accept for many managers. They reason that they could use the data to do some aspects of their work more effectively, such as targeting promotion, or even firing. Their company has paid to have the data collected, so why shouldn’t it be made available to them? However, if the individual confidentiality had been compromised, the data used against even one individual would have brought the entire data collection scheme to an abrupt halt."

The researchers also built some simple server apps to monitor when employees downloaded their mail.