Revision as of 17:31, 18 February 2022

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Abstract

Email Management generally refers to the systems and methods an employee can implement to make become more efficient when it comes to handling the abundance of email received every day. Email management is a method for increasing email efficiency while reducing the negative effects that email handling can have on an individual's productivity and job satisfaction. In the workplace, inadequate email management may waste a significant amount of an employee's time, as well as obstruct other employees, and have a detrimental influence on the firm as a whole. Email processing can take up more than 30% of an employee's workday, and if handling patterns aren't streamlined, it might be much more.

Background of Email

Worldwide daily Email traffic 2015-2019 ^[1].

The very first version of what we now know as email was invented in 1965 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) This was a part of the university’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which allowed users to share files and messages on a central disk ^[2]. This was a huge revalation since now communication could happen fast and instant, through the advancement and the expansion of technology email fast became the common way for communication both in businesses and private alike. At the end of the 1990s emails had gone from a luxury/curiosity to become a societal expectation like having a phone number.

Today Emails are by far the most common way of communication with a staggering 333.2 billion emails sent every day (2022) ^[3]and in total there are estimated to exist about 5.59 billion active email accounts worldwide ^[4].

Email is used for organizations of all sizes such as the government communicating with the population, B2B, B2C as well as one of the most prominent ways to market. As the number of internet users continues to grow and communication through the internet has become a daily routine. Marketing through emails has become a commonplace, even an inevitable phenomenon. Nowadays marketers use a lot of effort on webinars and video campaigns as well as other new opportunities to reach their customers. But even with new ways of marketing sprouting everyday, email still seems to be generally the most effective. Email in fact generates 42$ for every 1$ spent which amounts to 4.200% of ROI^[5] as well as being up to 40 times more effective at reaching target consumers, than Twitter or Facebook^[6] making email by far out scale any other options for marketing. The global E-mail marketing market was valued at $7.5 billion in 2020 and is projected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027. ^[7].

Importance of managing emails

In organizations, it is clear to see why email remains one of the most popular means of communication both for social environments as well as for businesses. Email makes it quick and user-friendly, enabling quick decision-making within the organization. Compared to other means of communication, emails are also one of the most cost effective ^[8] and a rich^[9] form of communicating. With these characteristics, email usage provides significant gains both for organizational productivity as well as efficiency.

Even though there is no doubt how much organizations across the globe are benefitting from using email to communicate both internally and externally, emails come with some pitfalls. The volume of emails sent and received every day is huge, which also results in this volume having huge cost implications, both organisationally and personally. To support the volume of emails organizations are estimated to spend up to $17 billion every year on email software as well as work time spent reading and writing emails.^[1]. It is estimated that workers on average will spend 28% of the workday sending and checking their emails alone, which is about 10.5 hours per week in an average danish 37.5 hours workweeks ^[10]The average worker is also typically interrupted every 5 minutes by email.^[11] Consequently the phenomenon of email overload emerges which is rather than email being beneficial for the organization and its users it now may be detrimental to the productivity. Email easy-to-use and substitute for other means of communications, such as meetings, calls, etc. may further reduce efficacy because a substantial proportion of emails sent or received within organizations are either non-business related (personal), non-business-critical, or just unsolicited spam.^[12]

In general, the phenomenon of email overload describes the situation where possible business disruption due to email use may significantly harm the well-being of users and impair their productivity. The term Email overload is well defined and is a phenomenon occurring when email use overwhelms the user. The term is most directly linked to the huge number of emails sent and received as well as the raw hours spent handling them such as writing, responding filing, and sorting them. Email overload is also less directly linked to the result of email use gives rise to the stress of its users.

The consequences of a huge volume of emails are that workers may fail to respond to critical mail, responded less accurately / wrong, ignore information, or even quit. Studies have shown that email systems contribute to the top two sources of workplace stress - constant interruptions and deadline pressures^[13] and the instantaneous nature of email might contribute to users feeling compelled to respond instantaneously coursing stress, as well as mail compiling in the inbox around the clock.

Email plays such a big role in most organizations and people's life, prober email managing there is a lot to gain to be found. In fact, it is estimated that poor communication is the number one reason project fails and is a contributing factor in 56% of projects that have failed.

poor communication since a lot of projects and programs in an organization directly correlate to the communication flow in the company. If critical information is lost

Importance of Email management

The abundance of Emails sent every day places a responsibility on each of the individual users to be able to censor, order, and structure emails sufficiently so critical information to not get lost in the ocean of emails. Having an organization with a clear and fast communication line is essential for an organization's to thrive. The flow of information both internal and external of an organization have to be efficient and be in order.

Even though there is no doubt how much organizations across the globe are benefitting from using email to communicate both internally and externally, emails come with some pitfalls. First of all, a lot of efficiency is lost due to poor email management which can result in a huge loss for the organization, second of all not being able to manage email properly also have a strong correlation to workers' mental health, especially increasing stress, lowering job satisfaction risking workers leave the organization.

Efficiency

Generally, all organizations are interested in being as efficient as possible since this will give a competitive advantage. It is important that resources are not wasted on unnecessary or redundant task so the focus can be put on what actually generate results for the organization. For this Human resources is a huge factor. To make the most out of the organization's resources its people also have to be efficient and not waste unnecessary time. The average professional spends a lot of their workday handling emails, it is estimated that workers on average will spend 28% of the workday sending and checking their emails alone, which is about 10.5 hours per week in an average danish 37.5 hours workweeks ^[10] If this time could be minimized without negatively impacting the quality of work huge gains can be expected. A 200-strong workforce on the UK minimum wage, is estimated to pay its staff £1.2m every year for reading and sending emails ^[14].

Job satisfaction

For oganization it

Research shows that the abundance of mail office workers receives every day also can be a course for stress and a contributor to a decline of mental health. ^[15] A majority of people have increased stress levels related to email stressors, such as email overload. Despite the rise of social networking within and outside of the workplace, email remains the primary means of digital communication for employees.

Further, many respondents felt that this was not appreciated with regard to work allocation: Work email takes up over two hours per day but is not considered workload. Some email relates to other activities such as teaching and research, but most is administrative in nature. Time spent on email is not recognised as a significant component of the work day. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1360080X.2015.1019121?casa_token=lrSqECw9SKQAAAAA:OoXOTzL0touAC2v5HOKnt2JjpeQPTpCAVaVFb6gaeZCRGw1PT9ddXYSb6vRtejE6Z8O3twcoWU6CAcM

Studies also show that approximately 92% of employees have elevated blood pressure and heart rate when they are handling emails at work were constantly checking emails as well as having unread emails serve as a stress factor. (https://nordic-it.com/5-facts-email-often-cause-stress/). With better Email management work efficiency will increase as well as the overall mental health of workers.

Email Management

The core problem of the issue of email management takes its roots in the email overload organizations face everywhere. Email overload is a well-established problem ^[8] and is a recognized problem, still many organizations fail to handle this problem. For managing ema

Common challenges of email management:

• Volume handling

. 64% of incoming emails are not relevant or do not need immediate attention [9]. Therefore, addressing all critical emails while ignoring the irrelevant is an ongoing challenge. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2556288.2557182?casa_token=G0NsdlSDav8AAAAA:kXX5ITn5Uymd8f00B2ATES_ceWJTZEtNeEZgdy62WxiYm0_PrsXC1dCJxP6f-qancSl9JZu52wRmYnw

• Sorting in what is important and what is not (spam)
• Storage and expenditure
• Over-checking emails

Ways to manage emails:

• Limiting the number of times you process mail in a day.
• Limiting the amount of time you dedicate to processing email in a given session.
• Only keeping your email program open while you are actively dealing with it.
• Checking email only when you are going to process it.
• Deleting as many messages as possible immediately.
• Responding immediately to messages that can be answered very briefly.
• Moving messages to be dealt with later to a separate folder.
• Responding to only emails that require responses.
• Limiting recipients to as few individuals as possible.
• Keeping responses brief.
• Deleting all messages that are not archived after a specific amount of time.
• work culture

The use of bulk emails and duplication was a source of frustration for 16 respondents: I wish people would stop and think before they hit ‘reply all’ or send large attachments that are irrelevant for my work. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1360080X.2015.1019121?casa_token=lrSqECw9SKQAAAAA:OoXOTzL0touAC2v5HOKnt2JjpeQPTpCAVaVFb6gaeZCRGw1PT9ddXYSb6vRtejE6Z8O3twcoWU6CAcM

Software that can help with the handling of Emails

MGI’s estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals—by 20 to 25 percent. (https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy) test test test

Limitations

Unfortunately it is not possible to have a fully automated system for handling emails duo to the inconsistent nature of emails contents but there are ways to make answering emails more streamlined and increase the quality

Annotated Bibliography

Following references may be beneficial for further reading on topic addressed in this article.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1} The radicati groupehttps://www.radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Email-Statistics-Report-2015-2019-Executive-Summary.pdf
2. ↑ The guardian (2016) How did email grow from messages between academics to a global epidemic? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/07/email-ray-tomlinson-history
3. ↑ Earth Web (2022) How many Emails are sent per day in 2022? https://earthweb.com/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/
4. ↑ Outlooktracker (2020) (https://www.outlooktracker.com/news/how-many-emails-does-the-average-office-worker-receive/)
5. ↑ hubspot https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats
6. ↑ Mckinsey - Why marketers should keep sending you e-mails https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/why-marketers-should-keep-sending-you-emails
7. ↑ Statista https://www.statista.com/statistics/812060/email-marketing-revenue-worldwide/
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1} Whittaker, S., and Sidner, C. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI ’96, ACM (1996), 276–283.
9. ↑ N.Panteli (2002) Richness, power cues and email text pp. 75-86
10. ↑ ^{10.0 10.1} Mckinsey - The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy
11. ↑ T. Jackson, R. Dawson, D. Wilson - Reducing the effect of email interruptions on employees International Journal of Information Management, pp. 55-65
12. ↑ N. Nelson (2003) - Anti-spam for business and ISPs: Market size 2003–2008
13. ↑ BBC (2000) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/654956.stm
14. ↑ Outlooktracker stats - https://www.outlooktracker.com/news/office-workers-spend-a-shocking-20-weeks-per-year-on-their-emails/
15. ↑ Professor Tom Jackson homepage https://profjackson.com/email-stress/

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