Why most company emails are worthless
Flickr user Hollywood_PR
(MoneyWatch) It might look like I spend a lot of time criticizing email, but the truth is that I do it out of love. I could not function without email, and sincerely believe modern business could not succeed without it (despite some occasionally crazy CEOs who challenge the status email quo).
That said, there's always room for more efficiency, which is why I found a recent study by email management firm mimecast so fascinating. The study found that on average only one in four emails have essential business value. Digging down, the company says that about 11 percent of email is personal (non-work-related) and 7 percent is spam.
If so much email isn't related to doing business, what are all those messages about? That's where a second study comes in, this one from Georgia Tech. As reported in WebWorkerDaily, the university's School for Interactive Computing read hundreds of thousands of messages and found that about 15 percent of them essentially amounted to gossip -- emails in which the sender and recipient discussed thirds parties in ways that had no business impact.
Does your office misuse or abuse email? Tell your story in the comments.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hollywood_PR
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That's not surprising and I'll go out on a limb and say that I think we need a bit of that kind of sticky inefficient human contact for there to be an inverse increase in team camaraderie and subsequent efficiency.
I've worked in a number of organizations and the ones that know how to play hard and work hard have always been the ones I enjoy the most, and the ones for which I'm willing to go that extra mile. When I feel like I'm either on or off the clock and have to be overly 'professional', well honestly, unless I'm working as a consultant, that kind of environment probably hinders my productivity.
For me, email misuse is writing long complicated, multi-point emails when something shorter woruld work, including non-pertinent people in a conversation, or over-using email when other channels are more efficient (talking, chatting, using a social media internal tool like yammer etc).