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Can you afford to take a “holiday” from your email?

Cillian Sweeney- Waterford Technologies               Leaving the office on holiday for a week or two can

Cillian Sweeney- Waterford Technologies              

Leaving the office on holiday for a week or two can often result in a stressful return to work and dealing with a mailbox almost at capacity.

The holiday season is well and truly upon us. Sitting here on the Irish Ferries sailing from Holyhead to Dublin I’m surrounded by people eager to get away from the hum drum of work for a week or two. The boat is packed with holiday makers & it’s great to see that tourism in Ireland is on a healthy upward curve once again. For those of you who haven’t made the trip to the Emerald Isle all I would say is, go. Whatever type of person you are you will find your ideal vacation in Ireland, from fantastic restaurants to friendly pubs, from romantic getaways to exceptional golf courses this little island has it all. I’m reading an article here in The Times titled “Germans get a break from curse of holiday email” the headline I’m sure was spotted by many of my fellow holiday makers. We’ve all been there, taken 2 weeks holiday to come back to 400+ emails, each to check to see if something important lies within. So what have the German’s done?

  • Daimler (the company behind Mercedes- Benz) have done a deal with it’s workforce that allows staff to refuse to receive work email while they are on holiday
  • They want to eliminate the stress of holiday email for it’s employees believing it to be destructive to morale & productivity
  • They have implemented a “mail on holiday” alert which will resend incoming email to colleagues or other parts of the company and delete them from the holidaying worker’s inbox
  • Wilfried Porth, the HR & Labour Director explained the company’s radical decision by saying “Our employees are to relax on holiday & not read business emails”
  • Trials have found that this new system appears not to have upset customers or suppliers, or even workers who are left to deal with colleagues unread email

Wow, sounds too good to be true! However, let’s say you are the IT Director/IT Manager/Network Manager for Daimler – this does not reduce your email traffic, rather it directs it to people who are not on holiday within the company. The challenge for IT remains the same. Are you in IT & responsible for managing email within your organisation? If so are these some of your daily challenges?

  • Enforcing mailbox quotas
  • Struggling to manage the space on your email server
  • Reluctantly allowing & perhaps regretting agreeing that management can have PST/NSF files
  • People hassling you asking you to find an email for them
  • Have a legal/FOI/HR request to search for email related to priority situation

If so, I would ask you to please visit us on www.waterfordtechnologies.com today & see how we can help you take the pain out of managing your email data. Can you afford to take a “holiday” from handling your organisation’s email?