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:
More than three in four workers (78 per cent) have experienced or witnessed a problem caused by hard-to-find emails or documents.
