By Steve Ranger, 13 August 2007 17:02
NEWS
A deluge of emails constantly interrupting work is stressing out modern employees, who become tired, frustrated and unproductive as they attempt to keep up with the barrage of messages.
One in three workers feels stressed by the number of emails they get and the obligation to respond - although a chilled-out 38 per cent said they do not reply to email until a day or even a week after receiving it.
The research, carried out by Dr Karen Renaud from the University of Glasgow's Computing Science department, psychologist Judith Ramsay of Paisley University and statistician Mario Hair, quizzed 177 people to see how they deal with emails received at work.
It found that employees working on a computer typically switch applications to view their emails as many as 30 or 40 times per hour, for anything from a few seconds to a minute.
While half of the participants said they check their email more than once per hour, and 35 per cent said they check every 15 minutes, monitoring software installed on their machines for the experiment showed they check email more often.
Dr Renaud said in a statement: "Email is the thing that now causes us the most problems in our working lives. It's an amazing tool but it's got out of hand. Email harries you."
She added: "The more distracted you are by distractions, including email, then you are going to be more tired and less productive."
The research said email senders at work should never press other employees, especially those they supervise, to respond to their emails as they would to a phone call. Recipients should not constantly monitor their emails since this will negatively affect all other work activities, and should instead set aside dedicated email reading time to catch up on what's landed in their inbox.
Comments
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1. Brian Murray
What is it a bad worker blames again .. ah yes!
Email is not the problem, it is the lack of people's ability to use it properly. I am continually amazed by the number of people of either:
(a) don't reply to emails (especially some of my colleagues in senior roles; and
(b) don't read their emails before sending them to make sure they say what they intended them to say.
It's a perfect communication tool for the modern world. It allows people to manage their communication time more effectively and maintains an audit trail. It does, however, need to be used correctly - I've always wondered why there are no courses by default at schools/universities to get this message across?
2. anonymous
Easy to solve - just set your email client to check for new emails once an hour or whatever, otherwise the temptation is always there to see whats just come in.
3. anonymous
And throw your Blackberry away!
4. Chris Stevens
No change from the old days. In the 1970's I had a boss who used to let letters etc accumulate in his in-tray. When the pile got too high he would take the bottom two thirds and dump them in a filing cabinet. Every 6 months he'd chuck out the mail from his filing cabinet.
He explained his reasoning to me. "If it is genuinely urgent I'll deal with it straight away. If not I'll wait until someone chases me about the letter when they think it is urgent."
He had a good reputation in the organisation for efficiency.