Strategies to Deal with Email Overload in Your Company

Are your employees telling you that they are overwhelmed by the amount of emails they receive every day? If so, you should listen.

Email overload is a serious issue that is affecting modern workers. What can feel like never-ending emails arriving in their inboxes all day is disruptive and affects their productivity. A report by McKinsey Global Institute found workers spend 13 hours every week – or 28 per cent of their time – on average just dealing with emails.

There’s also a good chance your employees are missing out on critical information that you are sending them as it gets lost in a swamp of unopened, unresponded to emails.

This issue is also affecting your bottom line! Annually it is estimated that companies around the world are wasting billions of dollars because of email overload.

If you want to help put an end to email overload in your organization, there are a number of strategies you could try.

1. Encourage staff to only send and reply when necessary

Everyone has been CC’d in on that one group email where there is no response necessary…but someone hits “reply all” anyway and says “OK” or “thank you”. It’s annoying, huh?

Encourage staff to think twice before they send or reply to any emails. Is it absolutely necessary? If not, don’t do it.

2. Use good collaboration tools

There’s a number of great options out there today like HipChat, Slack and even Google Documents where you can store information in one place when working on a project that team members are able to access instead of sending emails to one another.

3. Use DeskAlerts to send corporate communication

Instead of sending internal communication notifications by email, send them by DeskAlerts. This system will send pop-up messages containing information straight to the employees’ desktops.

This way you not only stop contributing to their bulging inboxes, but you can be sure that your important employee communications are being seen.

4. Encourage people to talk instead

Companies managed to exist and get things done before email came along. People used to talk to people more face-to-face or they’d pick up the telephone and speak to colleagues and clients.

Set a policy where you expect more actual conversations to happen and you’ll see emails drop off. This can be good for improving relationships as an added bonus.

5. Set parameters for emails

You can introduce rules to your email server where not everyone has the ability to send large group emails, for example to 50 or more staff members – only system administrators, for example, would have the ability to do this. Or exempt staff such as your CEO and senior executives, communications, IT and HR teams.

6. Ban email completely

It sounds radical in this day and age, but there are some companies that have had enough of the burden of email so much that they’ve done away with it entirely!

Other companies have taken less drastic measures and have set days such as “no email Fridays” where employees are urged not to send any emails at all on a prescribed day of the week.