With thoughts of holidays in many minds at this time of year, a recurring factor is what lurks in your in-box on the first day back at work. Take two weeks off and you could easily spend an entire morning sifting through well over a thousand messages. It’s almost enough to make you think twice about leaving in the first place.
Spam filters can only take out so much, and even then you normally still have to download it. And auto-responders aren’t a great help either when your in-box gets littered with Email undeliverable messages to the spam emails you’re never going to glance at anyway. And if care is not taken with some auto-responders, messages are forwarded to another in-box or email account, with the delightful result of having two loads of spam and undeliverable messages.
Maybe some of this accounts for new research released by Mesmo Consultancy (www.mesmo.co.uk) which states that over 50 per cent of UK business users are self-inflicted ‘emailaholics’. Apparently, these ‘emailaholics’ are unable to walk away from their emails, even when on leave or off sick.
Publishing their research on email behaviour at the Inbox/Outbox 2007 email management and marketing forum in London, Mesmo said more than half of the 415 respondents check emails when out of the office and 12 per cent check over 5 times a day. When questioned on the main reason for keeping in touch with the office, 67 per cent admitted that it is purely self-inflicted whilst only 20 per cent log in because their office expects them to do so.
Couple these figures with the fact that 1 in 4 Britons works longer than 48 hours each week, as reported last month by the International Labour Organisation, and the picture painted of work/life balance is pretty bleak.
In a technology-enabled “always-on” society, where people are connected to their workplace 24/7, email addiction is rapidly becoming a widespread affliction, highlighted by the mushrooming number of internet sites and blogs suggesting rehab tips and techniques. As the Mesmo survey reported, only 17 per cent of respondents give colleagues permission to deal with their emails in their absence and over 80 per cent read every single email in their inbox.
“The role that email plays in office politics (CC and BCC being the most lethal weapons), the fear of missing something and being blamed for it, together with the amount of personal emails received at work addresses are surely accountable for the lack of delegation and obsessive inbox scanning behaviour, contributing directly to the addiction,” commented Dr. Monica Seeley, founder of Mesmo Consultancy. “Moreover, as the survey showed, the majority of users are expecting to receive a reply to a business email in less than 24 hours. And if a reply is sent immediately, that sets the expectation for the next round of communications, fostering a very reactive and rather unproductive way of working.”
Issues around work efficiency and productivity were even highlighted by the way in which the survey’s responses were collected. The research, conducted by email amongst 4000 UK business users with 66 per cent of respondents at managerial/director level, attracted approximately half of the responses within the first hour of sending out the survey. This indicates that the majority of business users are willing to be distracted from the task in hand by emails landing in their inbox, breaking concentration with obvious loss of productivity as a consequence.
Mesmo Consultancy is planning to run another survey in association with the organisers of Inbox/Outbox within the next few months, to delve deeper into business users’ email behaviour and addiction.
Related HIE Business link - Create an email usage policy
