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6 Steps to Transform Email into a Center for Business Productivity

  • 6 Steps to Transform Email into a Center for Business Productivity-

    Understand Email Overload

    Email is perhaps the most ubiquitous workplace tool of the past 20 years, and its evolution over time has turned it into a primary source of information overload. Email was designed for simple, short-form communication, yet thanks in large part to its near 100 percent adoption across workplace environments, today email is used as the solution to countless enterprise communication challenges.

    Employee inboxes contain dozens of new requests, status updates, work orders, contracts and more. Each of these incoming messages has the potential to negatively affect a typical office worker's productivity for up to 23 minutes, according to the University of California, Irving's Gloria Mark.

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6 Steps to Transform Email into a Center for Business Productivity

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  • 6 Steps to Transform Email into a Center for Business Productivity-2

    Understand Email Overload

    Email is perhaps the most ubiquitous workplace tool of the past 20 years, and its evolution over time has turned it into a primary source of information overload. Email was designed for simple, short-form communication, yet thanks in large part to its near 100 percent adoption across workplace environments, today email is used as the solution to countless enterprise communication challenges.

    Employee inboxes contain dozens of new requests, status updates, work orders, contracts and more. Each of these incoming messages has the potential to negatively affect a typical office worker's productivity for up to 23 minutes, according to the University of California, Irving's Gloria Mark.

Email is driving enterprises to the cloud in droves, and according to a recent harmon.ie survey, cost savings on email storage and maintenance are the number one reason. In fact, while industry pundits predicted email's looming demise in favor of other social tools just a year or two ago, the cloud is now giving email a new breath of life. A 2015 Email Statistics Report from Radicati, the technology research firm that has published definitive email statistics for more than 20 years, revealed that the number of worldwide email users is expected to increase from 2.6 billion today to 2.9 billion by 2019, and that the average business user will receive 96 emails per day by 2019.

While email will continue to play a crucial role in the modern enterprise for decades to come, turning email from a source of distraction into a center for business productivity requires a new playbook. In 2012, consulting firm McKinsey discovered that reading and answering emails constituted 28 percent of an employee's weekly work tasks – this percentage has only increased in the absence of widespread behavioral and technological advances for reducing email overload.

In this slideshow, David Lavenda, vice president of product strategy at harmon.ie and information overload researcher, walks readers through the immediate and future steps enterprises must take to end email overload and embrace email as the center of business connectivity in a cloud environment.