With billions of emails being sent daily around the world, it's no wonder we're feeling a little "inbox overload". And if you're feeling the weight of it, imagine being Bill Gates: the Microsoft founder receives – roughly – 4 million emails per year!!! Gates presumably has minions to sort his inbox, but others confront an abundance of emails daily that demand to be answered... the biggest culprit being those intra-departmental emails that seem to inundate us constantly.
As we look to portable devices, such as a BlackBerrys and iPhones, to improve our workplace flexibility, the flipside is that these tools create a feeling of overwhelm, with employees often replying to messages at all times, day and night.So... what to do? The Australian School of Business has undertaken research into the productivity impact of emails, how to audit your email use at work, and tips for managing the workload that emails create and using email more effectively.
But it's not just spam that saps time and clogs inboxes. Information overload (IO), another by-product of the email age, also poses a problem. In a 2010 survey of 1700 knowledge workers by legal publishing house, LexisNexis, half of the respondents claimed that only about 50% of their emails – on average – were relevant to getting their jobs done. "The average Australian employee spends less than two-and-a-half days per week actually doing their job. The rest of the time is spent navigating a virtual forest of information," according to the report, Information Rage Impacting Australian Workers.
This article has some good tips and insights and is well worth a read.
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Marc Powell commented on 28-Jul-2011 12:59 AM
“We shouldn’t try and improve the way we use email in our organisation. We have to be brilliant at it – with every single message we send “ These were the words of an Account Manager at one of the UK’s leading advertising agencies during an Emailogic seminar.
He is right – his organisation is one of the leading communications companies on the planet. But this should be so for all of us in business surely – we should be brilliant at all our communications including email. We owe it to our customers, our colleagues
…. and ourselves. As a manager I would not expect my staff to aspire to becoming average at anything – especially communicating! And when I say brilliant I do not only mean writing clearly and concisely, spelling correctly and all that good common sense stuff.
But really thinking about the person at the other end, considering their values, circumstances, work patterns, pressures and deadlines. Is it really right to send a tight deadline to someone at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon and think ‘great – job done’? Because
it won’t be great for them! Also we should not tolerate unnecessary copies, political wrangling using email and copying in colleagues bosses when it is inappropriate. Would you invite a colleague for a chat and say “but can we go and have it in front of your
boss please”? Well why copy in their boss then? Don’t settle for the status quo – you can change the email culture of your organisation through changing your own behaviour. At Emailogic we are on a mission to make everyone brilliant at using this medium –
we call our Emailogic graduates Email Superheroes! We have created tens of thousands of them over the last few years .
He is right – his organisation is one of the leading communications companies on the planet. But this should be so for all of us in business surely – we should be brilliant at all our communications including email. We owe it to our customers, our colleagues
…. and ourselves. As a manager I would not expect my staff to aspire to becoming average at anything – especially communicating! And when I say brilliant I do not only mean writing clearly and concisely, spelling correctly and all that good common sense stuff.
But really thinking about the person at the other end, considering their values, circumstances, work patterns, pressures and deadlines. Is it really right to send a tight deadline to someone at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon and think ‘great – job done’? Because
it won’t be great for them! Also we should not tolerate unnecessary copies, political wrangling using email and copying in colleagues bosses when it is inappropriate. Would you invite a colleague for a chat and say “but can we go and have it in front of your
boss please”? Well why copy in their boss then? Don’t settle for the status quo – you can change the email culture of your organisation through changing your own behaviour. At Emailogic we are on a mission to make everyone brilliant at using this medium –
we call our Emailogic graduates Email Superheroes! We have created tens of thousands of them over the last few years .
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