Revision as of 10:13, 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

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 relation since now communication could happen fast and instant, through further work and the expansion of technology Email fast became the common way for communication both in business 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 the average office worker receives about 121 emails and sends about 40 emails for business purposes everyday day, 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. Branding 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 email still seems to be the most effective communication channel. 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 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 thriving the flow of information both internal and external of an organization should be in order.

Even though it 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

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 ^[8] (https://www.outlooktracker.com/news/office-workers-spend-a-shocking-20-weeks-per-year-on-their-emails/), as well as a 200-strong workforce on the UK minimum wage, is estimated to pay its staff £1.2m every year for reading and sending emails (https://www.outlooktracker.com/news/office-workers-spend-a-shocking-20-weeks-per-year-on-their-emails/). 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.

Job satisfaction

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. ^[9] 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

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 ^[10] and is known to many still, organizations fail to handle this problem

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. ↑ 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. ↑ 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
9. ↑ Professor Tom Jackson homepage https://profjackson.com/email-stress/
10. ↑ Whittaker, S., and Sidner, C. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI ’96, ACM (1996), 276–283.