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EMAIL MANAGEMENT COSTS CONTINUE TO ESCALATE

Fiona Mulvaney- Waterford Technologies  ARE YOU MANAGING EMAIL OR IS EMAIL MANAGING YOU? Today employees send and receive an estimated 110 emails

Fiona Mulvaney- Waterford Technologies 

ARE YOU MANAGING EMAIL OR IS EMAIL MANAGING YOU?

Today employees send and receive an estimated 110 emails a day, according to the Radicati Group. That’s expected to increase to 125 by 2015.

We talk to IT Managers every day who continually struggle with the large volume of emails and increasing size of attachments and the pressure this places on their email server, long back up times etc.,

We all are aware of the costs involved in managing email both from an IT perspective and also from an employee time & productivity point of view.

It is a simple fact that email communication is the lifeblood of an enterprise & contains key business intelligence, but with that enormous value comes enormous problems for organisations.

Numerous case studies have been written over the years about the problems email communication causes, however two recent studies I thought you might find revealing are as follows;

The most recent study on email comes from Dr. Ian M. Paul, a pediatrician at Penn State College of Medicine. Dr. Paul kept track of all his emails for an academic year and found that 2,035 mass distribution emails were received: 1,501 from the medical center, 450 from his department and 84 from the university.  Estimating that each took 30 seconds to read, and taking into account the average salary of doctors at the institution, email overload cost about $1,641 per physician per year. With more than 629 doctors on staff, that’s equates to more than $1 million in lost time. 

Other studies have placed time lost to email higher. According to McKinsey, high-skill knowledge workers spend 28% of their workweek managing e-mail. Increasing the productivity of social technologies could contribute $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in annual value across commercial sectors in the U.S.  Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine found that office workers are interrupted roughly every three minutes and once interrupted it can take 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task.

So what can you do to take control of email?

  • Have an email policy in place and have the technology in place to enforce the policy
  • Train staff on best practice email management i.e. when to email versus over communication, how mailing lists are used etc.
  • Use email reporting / archiving software to manage these situations
  • Continually monitor email usage in your organisation

Talk to us today to find out more about best practice email management.