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Only 10 % of Employees Claim Never to Waste any Time at Work

Donal McGuire- Waterford Technologies An email archiving solution could help you track down the non- work related mail that is filling up

Donal McGuire- Waterford Technologies

An email archiving solution could help you track down the non- work related mail that is filling up your mailboxes.

In the two minutes that it will take the average person to read this blog (The average adult reads prose text at 250 to 300 words per minute) it is estimated that 2.6 million videos will have been viewed on YouTube; 60 hours of videos will have been uploaded to YouTube; 454,000 people will have logged onto their Facebook accounts; 94,000 apps will have been downloaded, 200,000 tweets will have been sent and 40 million photos will have been viewed on Flickr. No doubt these statistics are already inaccurate. Apparently 64 % of employees admit to wasting at least half an hour at work each day on non-work related activities and checking their Facebook accounts or viewing the latest offers from Groupon feature heavily in such activities.

Of course one should praise the 10 % of employees who claim never to waste any time on non-work related activities, and no doubt this group does not place any burden on their employer’s IT structures or create additional problems for the company’s IT manager. But it is likely that the remainder do. A popular advert broadcast during most advertising breaks on commercial TV during the recent FIFA World Cup parodied the efforts of office workers to follow the tournament whilst at work without their ‘bosses’ discovering what they were up to.

This determination to follow the action in Brazil is innocent and is no doubt anticipated during such popular worldwide events as the World Cup and Olympic Games, probably lifting morale and productivity in the office, unless you are an England Football fan! But how can an organisation know which non-work related sites are being visited and what precisely is being downloaded to their systems during the rest of the year. The astronomical increase in work related emails each year requires organisations, small and large, to have an Email Archiving solution that captures, secures and stores emails which are the lifeblood of any commercial organisation. Without email communication sales reps would miss customers, employees would miss meetings, responsiveness would suffer and commitments would be impossible to keep. Such critical business information needs to be stored in a secure unalterable state that can be easily accessed and retrieved, the integrity of the communication being preserved.

However, an Email Archiving Solution with sophisticated, but easy to use, reporting features can do so much more for your organisation. A more valuable solution should allow you to manage compliance and regulatory issues; enforce company policies; and, monitor employees non-work related email activities. Such a solution will show you how your employees are using email. It will allow you to monitor activity; identify risk; spot suspicious unproductive behaviour; identify your top senders and recipients of emails; identify the most visited domains; identify top conversation pairs and subject lines; establish if emails are being unread for any significant period; and, identify the most popular attachments and determine which are suspicious.

Such an Email Archiving Solution will permit you to set internal email usage policies. It will show you how and why your email storage is growing. It will present to you on a weekly, monthly, annual basis the critical business information that will make your organisation more productive and profitable. Also by reducing the number of holiday and birthday etc. photos shared and downloaded as well as the latest YouTube video of Angela Merkel jumping for joy when Mario Gotze scored the winner it will reduce the amount of email data on storage and lower the cost of managing your email archiving.

If you would like to learn more about an Email Archiving solution, talk to us.