Misuse of email

Henley Management College carried out a research, sponsored by Plantronics, into the way managers spend their time. We found that 61% of managers are spending more than 2 hours a day dealing with emails but despite this 23% of mangers are spending 2 hours or more a day travelling for business. 31% said that at least half their emails were irrelevant to their jobs.

A similar survey with similar results has recently taken place in Spain by Sondea.com, where more than 200 executives from a wide range of productive markets participated. Their answers indicate that they spend an average of 2,24 hours per day dealing with emails, 1,49 hours in meetings and 1,33 hours on telephone calls. Again, around half of the emails are considered irrelevant and not all of them manage to transmit a clear message. According to these surveys, 43% of european executives manage to communicate a message efficiently in just 10% of the mails they send.

Some ideas:

• Quick math: 2,24 hours a day dealing with emails. Say sent/received are 50%. 50% of the received emails are irrelevant, and 90% of the sent emails are ambigüous. This means 1,7 hours lost just in the email. We can also consider some of the calls, say 10% are due to miscummunication in emails, so we can add an extra 13 minutes to the figure. 1,9 hours, at an average rate of around£50 per hour means a cost of £145 per executive per day due to inefficient use of email.
• 5 Hours per day are spent on communicating: meetings, email, telephone calls. Most of these communication relates to more than one person, so by finding a way to broadcast a message to everyone involved companies will reduce inefficiency costs. If this broadcasting allows also interchange between parts, feedback and real time answering that allows clarification on tasks and assignments, this inefficiency is reduces to a higher extent. The tool that will allow executives and any other employee to enhance communications is IM.
• Most of the emails sent fail to transmit what they intended to due to ambigüity and misinterpretation. I already mentioned a book, the Cluetrain Manifesto, in one of my recent posts. The authors at some point partly explain this fact by the common aim to transmit a corporative message in any communication to both employees and customers, somehow disguising the core of the message with company taglines and long paragraphs and dictionary underused wording. Make your message short, easy and personal.