You’re sat in the office.  You’re working.  A colleague wants to tell you something; what do they do?  Do they get up off their chair and wander across to where you are?  No.  Do they pick up the ‘phone and call you?  No.  They send you an email.

In fact, lots of colleagues do this to you all day.  You spend a great deal of your time receiving, reading and replying to internal emails.  Too much time in fact.  Probably more so than you do replying to the more important emails from outside the business.  So what’s the answer?  Should we ban internal emails?

Stats

One company, Halton Housing Trust is aiming to do just that.  In fact they have a lot of figures to back up their decision, so here goes…  40% of employees’ working week was spent dealing with internal emails.  Of 95,000 emails sent, 75,000 were internal.  Of 127,000 emails received, 68% were internal.  Remarkable, considering that outside of the working environment, very few people actually bother using emails at all.

People in the UK aged between 15 and 35 are pretty much all members of some social network.  96% in fact (yes, there’s another statistic for you).  They all communicate through texting or messaging via social media.  Email is no longer the way to communicate for many outside the workplace and many universities no longer issue student email accounts.

Return to Senders

Yet, still we go away for a day or go into a meeting and as soon as we return to our desks we have to spend hours sifting through numerous emails and voicemails – the majority of which are internal.  So what is the answer?  Much of them are blanket emails to all staff, featuring updates or information from managers.  This info could be easily incorporated within an intranet site or relayed in a weekly podcast.  (Yes, Fresh Air Studios can record these for you!  Contact us if you would like more information!)

The email has turned from being a way to communicate urgently to being the only way to communicate everything.  We are wasting too much time on them.  Collating non-urgent information to a weekly audio or intranet update will increase productivity, reduce the level of email traffic in our inboxes and allow staff to spend more time doing what they’re paid to do: work!

Contact Us!

If you want to know more about podcasts and other ways to use audio to communicate with staff, click on the “contact us” section of the Fresh Air Studios website.  Oh … and yes, we will answer your email!

For more information on The Guardian’s Halton Housing Trust article, click here http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2012/dec/17/ban-staff-email-halton-housing-trust

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