Posted by Nisha Amin on Dec 6, 2018 1:49:00 PM

KICK OFF 2019 WITH A BETTER EMAIL STRATEGY

YOUR CORPORATE TRAINING COMPANY

TrainingFolks Email Overload

The new year is almost here-and wouldn’t it be nice to come back to a more reasonable number of emails than you’ve been trying to deal with to date?

According to University researchers, people now spend one-third of their time at the office – and half of the time they work at home – reading and answering emails.1 

So, why has a tool like email, that is supposed to help us communicate more effectively become such a time suck for employees but more so for managers and up? 

It all comes down to the use of email and not understanding when to take a step back before hitting Send.Consider the number of emails in your inbox today that include one-word responses like “OK”, “Sure”, or perhaps the very effective “Yes”.  Employees may not know any better or truly understand the bigger impact of these one offs.

Statistics have shown that better use of email in the workplace could save up to 160 work hours in a year.  That’s a lot of productivity flying out the window.   And that’s just one of the pain points of ineffective use of email in the workplace.

After looking over the results, the researchers found that workers send and receive an average of 86 work-related emails at work and 25 from home.  And all this time spent on emails alone is discouraging employees, impacting productivity and making people sick, the researchers said.2

Relying on sending emails for anything and everything has drastically reduced the time spent in face to face discussions.  In relevant cases, face to face discussion can create a much healthier conversation than relying on the interpretation of tone in an email.  The understanding of the project, question or task is also clearly laid out when speaking to someone in person versus trying to decode what a person may be asking for in email format.

Turn around time also tied directly to productivity is also affected by the poor use of email. 

One, the sender may be emailing the wrong person for the answer that they need.  This means a time lag in getting what they need to continue to get the job done until they find the right person. 

Two, the person that received the email may not be around and may not check their email until later in the day or that week meaning the sender will be waiting on important information until then. 

Three, unless employees have been trained to set timelines for every request, the turnaround time on a request is left undefined and could be done very quickly or not done for weeks based on the receiver’s interpretation of importance.

Aside from work and work-related issues, poor use of email can also lead to personal problems like workplace stress levels.

It's time to start using email more effectively.  If your organization does not have email tips in place or policy in use, begin the conversation today with this free download entitled 10 Tips for Workplace Email Excellence

EmailExcellenceTips-DownloadNow

It provides 10 things to consider before hitting send and a very easy guide for employees to follow as you work towards managing what can feel like an endless inbox.

1,2 https://globalnews.ca/news/3395457/this-is-how-much-time-you-spend-on-work-emails-every-day-according-to-a-canadian-survey/

Topics: corporate training tips, team development, email strategy

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