Company Email Patterns Change During Crisis

Researchers Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes have come up with an interesting study looking at how, and if, emailing patterns changed during a company's hard times. Working at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, they set out to analyze the emails of Enron, the famous energy company known for its accounting fraud scandal, to see if they could find a relation between the emails and the events preceding the bankruptcy. And, surprisingly or not, they could, as reported by the New Scientist.

It turns out that employees began to change the way they emailed a full month before the crisis. The number of active email cliques, which are groups where every member has a direct contact with all of the other members, rose from 100 to almost 800, and most emails were shared between members of those groups and less with the other employees. The researchers believe this indicates a behavior change, as people start talking with the ones they know and trust personally and become less likely to share information with others.

Gilbert Peterson from the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, was another researcher working with the Enron email data and he believes that, while further research may be necessary, the findings could prove very valuable for companies. "Human resources folk would probably find this extremely useful," he said.

But, while these types of studies might prove very helpful and informative, researchers rarely have the chance to analyze a company's private emails in light of privacy concerns. Few companies are willing to hand the email data to researchers, even if anonymised, and, moreover, few Universities have done so. Though, it may be possible that, because of the potential value they can hold, large companies are actually analyzing their internal emails looking for some telling patterns.