Australian workers spend almost an hour a day administering email
MacroView
MEDIA RELEASE
Australian workers spend almost an hour a day administering email
Research finds email filing, searching and rework consuming an estimated 58 minutes a day and potentially exposing organisations to millions
Australian workers spend an estimated 58 minutes every workday on email administration beyond simply reading and responding, according to new research examining the hidden cost of unmanaged email.
The research, commissioned by Australian email management technology company MacroView and conducted by independent consumer research agency Antenna, found workers spend an estimated 105 minutes a day on email-related activity.
While around 47 minutes is spent reading and responding, the remainder is consumed by tasks such as filing and saving emails, searching for attachments and documents, recreating information and deciding where material should be stored.
Bring Back the Calm: The Cost of Chaos Index shows that even a fraction of the administrative burden of email-related activity can add up quickly, with a conservative 10 minutes of time being avoidable per employee per day, resulting in more than a million per annum in lost productivity for an organisation of 500. This is based on a labour cost of $54 per hour (drawn from ABS data) and a conservative rounded estimate of there being 230 working days per year.
The report was launched alongside MacroView’s new Microsoft 365 email filing solution designed to reduce the manual work involved in saving business-critical emails and attachments, SureFile.
MacroView Chief Executive Officer Colin Titmuss said the report demonstrated just how much email had become a significant source of hidden administrative workload and how it was not only an individual productivity problem but a business systems issue.
“Almost an hour a day is being absorbed by the administration around email, before you even consider the time people spend actually reading and responding to messages,” Mr Titmuss said.
“Not all of that time is avoidable, but it shows how much manual friction has built up around one of the most important business systems organisations use every day.
“Even if we take a conservative view of 10 minutes being avoidable administrative time per employee per day, that equates to $2,070 per employee per year. For a 150-person organisation, that is $310,500 annually. For a 500-person organisation, it is more than $1 million.”
The research also found:
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More than three in four workers (78 per cent) have experienced or witnessed a problem caused by hard-to-find emails or documents.
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Almost half (48 per cent) have seen time wasted searching for information.
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More than one in four (28 per cent) have seen missed follow-ups or delayed responses.
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More than a third (37 per cent) say their organisation has no process for saving or filing work emails and attachments, while another 27 per cent say a manual process exists but it is not properly followed.
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One in 10 workers have witnessed a compliance, audit, privacy, security or legal concern where an email, attachment or document was hard to find.
Mr Titmuss said the issue extended beyond lost productivity - with exposures also creating potentially expensive compliance issues and lost revenue from missed business opportunities.
“Email is where decisions are made, approvals are given, documents are exchanged and client history is captured,” he said.
“But too often that information is left in personal inboxes or relies on individuals to manually save it in the right place.
“If business-critical information only lives in one person’s inbox, it is not really under organisational control.”
The report says one-in-four workers leave important emails in their inbox and rely on search to find them later, creating risks when employees are away, change roles or leave the organisation.
The Cost of Chaos Index argues the solution is not to ask employees to spend more time manually filing email, but to remove the friction from the process.
“The organisations that get email chaos under control will be those that make information-management behaviour easier and automatic, rather than relying on already-busy employees to file everything manually,” Mr Titmuss said.
“With SureFile, a user can associate an email with a client, matter or project and the filing happens automatically in the background. That email and future replies in the same thread can then be captured in the appropriate Microsoft 365 location without someone repeatedly filing each message manually.
“That means less administrative effort for employees and a more complete, consistent record for the organisation.”
SureFile is available in an Enterprise version, which operates in the cloud and can continue filing emails even when a user is offline, on leave or has left the organisation, and a Desktop version built into classic Outlook.
The solution is designed to centrally capture important correspondence in Microsoft 365, reducing reliance on individual filing habits and improving the findability of business-critical information.
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Contact details:
Aleks Miljkovic
Lighthouse Communications Group
0424 341 853 | [email protected]
Jane Stagg
Lighthouse Communications Group
0422 578 541 | [email protected]