The 3 most important reasons you need to STOP the email madness ... right now. | InspireHUB

You're exhausted. We get it! And if your boss isn't convinced that your "email fatigue" is a real problem, we've done your homework for you so you can send up the SOS. What your boss cares about is the bottom line. Here's a primer to help you make the case that it's time to handle internal communications in a different way.

Email may be more than 40 years old, but it's not slowing down. In fact, it's still growing!  

• According to a study done by Informz, email volume within associations had already increased by 12.3% in 2016 alone. (source: "Association Email Marketing Benchmark Report" from Informz)
• A whopping 269 billion business and consumer emails were sent and received each day in 2017 with a projected growth rate of 4.4% each year over the next 4 years.(source: "Email Statistics Report, 2017-2021" study released by US-based technology research firm Radicati Group)

We've assembled a list of stats to help your organization understand why ignoring the issue with email will cost them. Read on to learn more! 

1.  Email is overwhelming your employees.

Email fatigue is real and has a tangible effect on the morale of your team:

• Tweet This ▶ 74 percent of Americans feel overwhelmed by the number and frequency of emails they receive.
• Nearly half (44%) are worried about missing an important email due to message overload.
• Nearly all U.S. adults (87 percent) have taken steps to manage this problem with almost half (44 percent) admitting they have spent hours deleting emails they don’t want.
• 32 percent of respondents said they receive up to 100 emails per day
• 33 percent say they feel stressed when they receive too many messages.
• The person they are most concerned about missing an email from is a co-worker or professional contact, and their boss. (source: 2017 "Edison Software" survey of 1,068 U.S. adults )

 
How does this affect your staff's work day?

• Tweet This ▶ Each week, the “typical’’ knowledge worker spends 11.7 hours processing email at work and an added 5.3 hours from home for a total of 17 hours or a third of their work week.
• Each day, they send/receive 86 work-related emails at work and 25 from home. (source: 2017 Carleton University study, Canada)

 2. Email is costing your company money!

The bottom line?

Email is the #1 time-waster at work, with people receiving an average of 304 business emails each week. Worse?

• The average employee checks their email 36 times in an hour,
• requiring 16 minutes just to refocus after handling an incoming email, and
• losing 10 IQ points when dealing with constant email, which is the same as missing an entire night's sleep!

That bottom line? The annual productivity costs per employee:

• $1,250 managing spam and another
• $1,800 dealing with unnecessary emails.

(source: The Atlassian - You waste a lot of time at work.)

There are also hidden costs to your company in not addressing the stress caused by email fatigue.  Author Jeffrey Pfeffer's got a thing or two to say about this in his new book: "Dying For A Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health And Company Performance And What We Can Do About It" (HarperCollins, March 2018):

• Tweet This ▶ “Workplace environments in the United States ….account for about $180 billion additional health-care expenditures, approximately 8 percent of the total health-care spending.” The biggest contributor to that cost? Stress.

• Tweet This ▶ “One survey reported that 81 percent of respondents said they checked e-mail on the weekends, 55 percent said they logged in after 11 p.m., and 59 percent said they looked at e-mail while on vacation.”  (source: Forbes - "How Stress Is The Business World's Silent Killer")

• Tweet This ▶ More than half of employees surveyed in the Carleton study reported high levels of work overload and stress, much of it associated with spending so much time reading and replying to emails. (source: 2017 Carleton University study, Canada)

3.  Email overload is making you dumber. (Yes, really. )

Did you know that ...

•  Tweet This ▶ Professor Gloria Mark, Department of Informatics at the University of California, found it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to a task after an interruption such as an email. Her research shows these interruptions are directly related to an increase in stress.  (source: Fast Company - Worker, Interrupted: The Cost of Task Switching)

• Tweet This ▶ “The distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20 percent dumber.” (source: Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab study commissioned by the New York Times to measure the brain power lost by  interruptions)

Let us help you take control of your internal communications!

Let us show you just how much we can help you save in time and money while increasing your employee engagement. Our proprietary ROI calculator will help you understand the impact to your organization.  so you can see exactly what these statistics actually mean in hard dollars in your OWN company. 

Looking for a few more great ideas?  Check out ...

 ▶ 5 simple ways to use video to reach employees and boost engagement.

You are desperate to keep your employees "in the know" but the reality is that with increasing dispersed channels it's not easy.  Nothing is worse then one of your employees discovering an important company announcement from an outside channel.  Video is a game changer and we're here to help with some great ideas on how you can leverage this great tool for your organization's internal communications.