The average employee loses a day per week to emails, according to Slack study

[midian182]

In brief: Do you spend a disproportionate amount of time drafting emails, many of which will be ignored completely by the recipient? A new study by Slack found that employees lose up to eight hours and 42 minutes each week on this futile endeavor, and yet, as one executive put it, "Email is the cockroach of the internet – it simply won't die."

Slack surveyed over 8,000 small business employees as part of its research. It found that workers are drafting 99 emails on average each week. Not only is this taking huge amounts of time, but it also seems quite pointless when two in five people admit that they don't bother reading emails that are longer than eight sentences.

The study also showed that the average employee ignores six emails per day based on the subject line alone, while 48% said they miss emails due to spam or junk folders. A further 44% admitted that their inboxes are full of irrelevant emails. All of this means that a third of workers aren't seeing important details as the messages are being ignored, deleted, or missed.

Another problem that 55% of respondents have with emails is that it's easy to misconstrue their tone. It's no surprise that 27% of people believe that email is an "outdated form of communication."

The email problem is impacting productivity, with two-fifths of workers saying that related menial tasks are making them feel bogged down, while almost half say checking their inboxes constantly is making it difficult to succeed in their roles.

Deirdre Byrne, Head of UK and Ireland at Slack, gave a fairly damning summary:

"Email is the cockroach of the internet – it simply won't die. Yet when it comes to business communication, the research reveals this 50-year-old tech isn't fit for purpose. Employees at small businesses are losing a working day each week to drafting emails – which often go unread – at the expense of productive work."

For all the complaints about AI and its potential to replace human jobs, 51% of those surveyed said its ability to perform manual and repetitive tasks, which in this instance would presumably be drafting emails and scanning them for important details, is an appealing element of the technology.

This isn't the first time Slack has criticized email. It did the same last year, highlighting many of the issues brought up in the recent study. The company suggested workers use other, more efficient ways to collaborate and communicate, including, of course, Slack.

h/t: UC Today, center image: Maksim Goncharenok

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/100482-average-employee-loses-day-week-emails-according-slack.html

 

[LetTheWookieWin]

<rant>
Want to know what’s a worse time killer than emails? Receiving a teams chat message that interrupts my flow, often requires my immediate response (even if to say, “Let me get back to you”), and having to wait minutes for a hunt and peck artist to type their question in real time for something that usually isn’t critical to begin with.
</rant>

 

[Puiu]

Like it or not, official communication has to happen.

 

[m3tavision]

Who are these numpties....?

I check my emails Once a week. Nothing in an email is timely... just errant notifications and fluff. Anything important is a text or phone call.

 

[mgwerner]

Email is often the only form of confirmation that a thing can be done, and that permission has been given. In my line of work, and that of a number of my friends from a previous career, email is the only CYA that exists. If what is going on in the article is true, I see that as an office culture issue that needs to be addressed, not an email issue. Our business has policies on email so that we do not run into overflowing inboxes, etc.

And if your email box is full of junk, either your IT needs a better filter system, or you need to learn how to manage an inbox. Or both.

Cannot agree more with LetTheWookieWin; Teams needs to die. And people using it need to learn how to type.

 

[waclark]

Most of my day is email, as I work from home. I would say that most of the emails I send are not "wasted" time. We communicate with customers all over the world. I provide feedback to our marketing and development teams. Usually emails result in a follow up call to dive deeper into whatever issue, problem or recommendation we are making. If not for email, I'd be on a phone all day and that can be more time wasting than sending emails.

 

[passwordistaco]

...says the company that wants you to use their product instead of email.

 

[mgilbert]

Email can't hold a candle to the ultimate waste of a worker's time - meetings, especially the ones that could have been a two paragraph email...

 

[p51d007]

The only part about email I hate, is whomever created the "reply all" button.
I hate it when the owner sends an email about ANYTHING, and the butt kissers have to hit the
reply all button when responding.

 

[Knot Schure]

The only part about email I hate, is whomever created the "reply all" button.
I hate it when the owner sends an email about ANYTHING, and the butt kissers have to hit the
reply all button when responding.

No Sir.

Being able to 'Reply All' saves me copying in customers from multiple organazations one-by-one. Also useful for blasting a rude participant publically.

The BCC, is the one I hate. You get a mail and can't see whom else involved, or witness to your roasting.

 

[mrvco]

Working for a ‘very large’ and ‘very insular’ company, I get very little external email (junk or otherwise). However the amount of internal (primarily irrelevant and/or nonsense email, many of which have multi-MB attachments ) perpetually overwhelms my inbox. Corporate IT’s only ‘solution’ is to limit mailbox sizes, which just forces me to mass delete unread emails every month or two. If / when I miss an ‘important’ email, I’ll get the inevitable ‘Did you see my email?’ Slack DM.