Survey: Information overload from work emails impacting employee productivity

Contributed by Charles Nguyen (Wednesday, September 08, 2010) | Category : Email messaging trends

Employees are largely becoming less effective as a result of their companies' email practices, according to a recent survey.

The study, conducted by OnePoll in conjunction with salesforce.com, found 38 percent of 1,000 British employees responding said they suffer from an information overload with their work emails. The study shows how common enterprise email tactics have been diminishing employee efficiency, according to Tim Barker, vice-president of EMEA strategy for salesforce.com.

"The habit of blasting out emails to a large group of people to ensure that there is no chance of leaving anyone out of a particular message has created a situation where email is now becoming counter-productive," he said.

The study also revealed a major dynamic of enterprise networks that may lead to email archiving of unnecessary messages. Seventy percent of respondents claimed they were regularly sent irrelevant emails or were copied on emails that were of no interest to their duties. Integrating an effective email archiving solution to manage vast amounts of messages can help businesses improve their overall productivity.

In fact, an overall increase in enterprise email activity could have even more of an impact on email archiving. A recent study found employees are increasingly using their business email accounts outside of work hours, creating a constant influx of messages for business networks to manage.