NEW YORK – If you are searching for quick ways to increase your company’s efficiency, cutting back on e-mail communication by your workers is one good candidate. According to Gartner Inc., a business-research company, more than a third of all the e-mail messages that workers receive from other employees in their own company is unnecessary.
The Gartner analysts say this “occupational spam” wastes a lot of time and clogs internal networks and servers. On average, employees spend 49 minutes a day managing e-mail, according to the researchers, and one out of four spends more than an hour a day on it. Yet only 27% of the e-mail messages that workers receive actually demand immediate attention.
“If a company rids itself of occupational spam, it will experience a 30% savings in the time its workers spend managing e-mail,” according to Neil MacDonald, a Gartner research director. “Managers should set the tone for e-mail usage and train employees to use e-mail more efficiently.”
Some simple steps to cut back on e-mail clutter include avoiding using the “reply all” button and using standard distribution lists with caution. Recipients who get unwanted e-mail from their co-workers should politely remind them that they don’t need or want the correspondence. Forwarding jokes, chain letters or other nonbusiness e-mail should be actively discouraged.
Intranet tools that assist collaboration among team members on projects can be far more efficient than e-mail, Gartner noted. Even such common devices as chat rooms, bulletin boards and instant messaging may work better than e-mail for such collaboration.
