Did you know that an average worker spends 28 percent of their work week on emails? Expectedly, this leads to severe impacts on their overall employee experience, due to constant information overload and workflow fragmentation. We share three impacts to watch out for and recommendations for the way forward.
Email is a workplace staple for organizations around the world; according to estimates, there were 38 billion email accounts Opens a new window at the start of 2019 – marking a 100 million increase from last year. Now, it is easy to imagine how this would lead to massive information overload on a day-on-day basis. Additionally, employees risk mindlessly scrolling up and down their inboxes when bombarded by too many emails, missing out on critical messages. This overwhelms can negatively impact their employee experienceOpens a new window in the workplace. And this fact is backed by some very interesting data.
In the month of April 2019, Symphony Communications released the results of its Symphony “Workplace Confidential†SurveyOpens a new window . Of those surveyed, 69 percent said that email made them feel the most overwhelmed at work. This is a significant number, and it can help us make a fair assessment of how this may impact productivity.
Learn more: 6 Employee Experience Predictions for 2019Opens a new window
How Does Email Overwhelm Influence Employee Experience (EX)?
“Information overload is the biggest challenge facing internal communicators today. And even more so now with increasing pressure to get staff up to speed on important topics such as cyber-security, company culture, and health and safety,†saysOpens a new window Chris Leonard, Co-founder, and CEO at internal communications solutions provider, SnapComms.
The emails don’t stop, and they probably won’t, but this is how they are influencing the employee experienceOpens a new window :
1. Heightened stress, inside and outside of work
Email is no longer simply a mode of communicating thoughts and ideas – for most professionals, it implies a task that has to be completed, a meeting that has to be scheduled/attended, or a query that demands an immediate response. Given that a major share of email communication is carried out via personal devices, this information overload cuts into weekends, after hours, and quality time with friends and family. As a result, information overload turns into work overload and stress.
Learn more: Decreasing Workplace Stress – Advice from Tech LeadersOpens a new window
2. Continuous distraction
Time spent reading and responding to emails takes away from more productive activity. An urgent mail arriving while an employee is deeply immersed in a task can cause distractions, stretch timelines, and ultimately force the employee to put in additional hours – simply due to ill-timed information overload. Symphony’s research revealed that 43 percent of professionals admit to constantly checking their email, even outside work hours!
(Pro-tip: Here Opens a new window is a handy tool which tells you exactly how much time you are spending every year on email.)
3. An urgent need to multitask
While some level of multitasking is essential at any workplace, it shouldn’t be normalized or ingrained into the work culture. Studies over the years have consistently proven that multitasking is ineffective in the long run and can bring down productivity. Faced with frequent emails and consequent information overload, employees are forced to switch from task to task, app to app, and workflow to workflow, pushing their minds to keep up.
Beyond Emails: Tackling Information Overload Holistically
In many ways, digital workplaces have evolved from emails, moving into mobile apps and SaaS-based platforms. However, this creates a whole new type of information overload. With multiple apps for different workflows, employees have to constantly switch facing the same challenges as in the case of email overload, only at a higher magnitude.
“The productivity impact of app overload or app fatigue is one of those slightly obscure, beneath-the-water-line problems every office faces,†saysOpens a new window Roy Pereira, CEO, and Founder of video conferencing solution Zoom.ai.
However, interestingly, Symphony’s study found that about 80 percent of employees believe that using a collaboration tool for communication instead of the email will lead to greater productivity, particularly when communicating with their remote colleagues.
To tackle this, we recommend:
- Exploring tighter integrations among productivity tools so that there is a single platform consolidating all the information.
- Adopting bots that offer timely reminders from a multitude of apps in a personal and unified format. “This is particularly true where integrations with business processes enable automation tools such as bots to help complete tasks,†says Jonathan Christensen, Chief Experience Officer at Symphony.
- Moving more agile tasks to chat tools instead of putting everything on email, such as scheduling meetings and having a quick chat about certain tasks for instant responses.Â
Learn more: Our Next Battleground for Technostress – The WorkplaceOpens a new window
Key Takeaways
To conclude, here are words by LinkedIn CEO Jeff WeinerOpens a new window to live by: “I decided to conduct an experiment where I wouldn’t write an email unless absolutely necessary. End result: Materially fewer email and far more navigable inbox. I’ve tried to stick to the same rule ever since.â€
It’s 2019, and email, though a great place to keep records of critical information, is becoming less of a collaborative tool and more of an invasive one. Organizations that realize this and move communications to less formal, more flexible collaboration and chat solutions are likely to see improvement in productivity and a more positive employee experience.
How are you helping your employees tackle email overwhelm at your organization? Tell us about your tactics to combat this on FacebookOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , or TwitterOpens a new window . We are always listening!