RIP Email: Embracing the Digital Workplace

Financial firms have used email-based workflows for decades, but technology now allows us to channel our efforts more efficiently.

In a given month, Northern Trust Asset Servicing receives about 17 million emails. Email has become a central fixture of our workday, often dictating when and how we do things. Email, in its infancy, transformed legacy operations. But times have changed. The era of ‘You’ve Got Mail’ has transformed into a sinking ship of ‘You’ve Got Way Too Much Mail.’ Now, in this digital age, the tides are moving towards a more intelligent and efficient way of working by utilizing emerging workflow technologies.

If you run a business solely on email, you’re basically reacting all the time. Today’s arsenal of AI capabilities, project-management tools, and a plethora of technological marvels have opened the floodgates to productivity. So, no longer are we merely reacting, but evolving into an agile and proactive digital workplace.

The bigger picture

Financial services firms aren’t the only ones facing challenges managing the flow of communications and data. A recent study from Microsoft found that workers lost a significant chunk of time due to inefficient communications: they spent 15% of their time sending and replying to emails; 23% of their week in meetings; and 19% using chat tools, according to the study. Beyond time lost, email and communication overload is hitting firm’s bottom lines. To illustrate this, Harris Poll, in a 2022 study , reported that leaders lost around 7.47 hours each week to poor communication — or approximately $12,506 per employee every year.

What gets sacrificed is the focus time that allows workers to do their jobs best. This hurdle is only going to get more acute as the volume of communication goes up. According to an estimate from the Radicati group, a market-research firm, the number of consumer and business emails sent and received per day will grow to more than 376 billion by the end of 2025. This is a major challenge that we need to attack aggressively, or risk falling behind as a growing number of clients demand faster, more effective actions and responses to questions.

This shift to a digital workplace environment represents somewhat of a revolution for a risk-averse industry — particularly firms dealing with asset managers and asset owners — but a necessary one to best serve our clients. The digital workplace is the new era of business, and we are welcoming it with open arms.

So how will all this work?

Two transformative technologies that will help digitize and streamline workplace processes are automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Firms across industries have saved countless hours automating repetitive tasks, including data entry, approval processes and billing. For example, Toyota Financial Services has used automation to create bots that eliminate the need to manually type certain messages to clients based on available information. The result: more than 150,000 person hours saved since 2019. Automation can help with the routing and processing of requests for task categories that include ‘help desk’-type inquiries, accounts payable and information requests.

AI can help to make employees’ lives easier through its advanced capabilities to analyze and mine data. It can act as a digital assistant to help employees complete their jobs more quickly and in turn, have more time for value-added tasks that require their human advice, including client advisory functions. However, it is important to note that AI is still in its early stages of development and outputs still need to be closely supervised.

We believe these tools will help augment our collective skill sets, that, in turn, will allow our employees to focus on client service and client advisory tasks.

What does this mean for us, at a practical level?

Our quest to revolutionize the way we work is starting to become a reality. We’ve actually rolled up our sleeves and have been putting these innovations into practice. In our digital workplace strategy, we’re introducing new workflow technology to ensure each message can be tracked as part of a larger, searchable repository of communication.

We also are looking at AI to remove some of the busy work resulting from searching a high volume of messages. We envision AI capabilities, over time, will be able to mine through information hubs and suggest next-best actions. In addition, we want requests that come in to be immediately assigned and routed to key contacts to take action. This will reduce the duplication of efforts, so that multiple individuals supporting a client or project are not responding to the same query. Others involved will be able to check the status of queries, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

A new approach

We are at the early stages of implementation of our digital workplace plan, but step one of our transformation journey was harnessing the power of Microsoft Dynamics to help manage client information, inquiries and organize the flow of information. The platform allows us to capture all client interactions, including email, phone calls, memos and more — in one place. The result is a single user interface for employees to manage multiple channels of client communication (i.e. omnichannel), enabling us to orchestrate and streamline our tasks, responses and communications.

This year, we started by onboarding 1,000 employees and 400 mailboxes as our initial MVP. On average we saw a 70% reduction in auto-content and bulk email noise using intelligent routing and cross-functional collaboration to remodel outdated processes. One team is now able to service our clients in one-third of the time, which has increased productivity, capacity and helped drive quicker responses to client inquiries.

Facilitating internal innovation

IT is no longer just the domain of the IT team. The rise of low-code tools means many more employees can build solutions that align with business processes they’ve developed and problems that arise throughout the course of their work. Citizen developers are democratizing technology and giving knowledge workers the keys to build bespoke tools to suit a wider array of use cases.

“The workforce is becoming increasingly tech-savvy, and many younger workers are interested in developing their own applications,” Gartner vice president and analyst, Adrian Leow recently told CIO.com . “By empowering autonomy within business units, software engineering leaders can reduce the workload that would otherwise fall to their software engineers, enabling them to focus on more strategic projects that are better aligned to their skills.”

At Northern Trust, our new Digital Partner Platform empowers employees to use low-code tools to build tailored solutions to issues that arise in the course of their work. We’re empowering our people to build solutions for problems that arise — on the fly.

More than 600 citizen developers are using the Microsoft Power Platform suite to further augment the workflow connected to Dynamics with a mission to:

1. stop inefficient processes and bulk email noise,
2. reroute emails to auto-archival solutions,
3. automate manual processes, and
4. re-engineer op models to derive productivity gains and modernize our legacy tech stack.

With this new product suite, our employee experts have the power to shape business processes in ways that best fit into the trajectories of their daily activities.

But we cannot simply automate business processes: An analytics-supported digital workplace requires us to rethink how we work; the change management aspect should not be underestimated! And of course, monitoring and controlling our community of citizen developers is critical to ensure we’re complying with applicable laws and regulations.

Embracing the Journey

The financial industry as a whole is slowly progressing digital workplace transformation due to our respective risk appetites. But a new generation of tools and evolved client and employee expectations necessitates a new approach. I am excited to have begun this journey to a smarter, faster and more agile workplace.

We need to urgently upgrade email-based workflow systems to improve productivity and benefit from a growing number of new workplace tools coming onto the market. This is a sink-or-swim moment that industries need to address now.

Shopify’s chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian put it succinctly in a memo to staff.

“Email hasn’t evolved in the last 30 years. And it still sucks,” he said.