Research indicates that as much as a third of that time is wasted dealing with email that is either badly headlined, badly written, poorly structured, unfathomable, or just plain unnecessary.
According to Alistair Gordon, Research Director at the Inbox Alliance, "If you employ 500 office workers, and they are wasting an hour of each other’s time a day (which is typical), that’s 500 hours a day (at say $30 an hour), say $75,000 a week, multiplied by 48 weeks – it comes to a grand total of $3.6 million.
That isn’t the whole story, of course. That’s just wasted time. What could have been achieved for the enterprise if that time has been gainfully employed doing positive work? Improving customer service? Responding quicker to internal requests? More being produced? Products and services reaching the marketplace faster? Our estimate is that the real cost to the enterprise is at least five times the cost of wasted hours. That’s $18,000,000 in a 500 person enterprise,"
Inbox overload is a huge productivity issue for enterprises, and to date, most companies are doing nothing about it.
The Inbox Alliance is offering – completely free and without any obligation to purchase anything from them – a quick way to start. Their offer is to quantify the problem in your enterprise, benchmarking the Email habits of your office workers against other enterprises. Armed with the resulting report, which they will supply free to you, you’ll be able to consider whether training investments in the future in this space are required – and will deliver strong ROI – or not.
The Inbox Alliance has recently undertaken a large study and collected general office worker population data on email habits http://www.workemailsurvey.com. They are giving ten organisations the opportunity – at no charge – to benchmark the email habits of their employees against those of (a) the general office worker population, and (b) nine other organisations. The survey will take 50 to 100 of your office workers no more than 10 minutes to complete. It is a small time investment on behalf of your team, in getting to the bottom of potentially a huge problem.
