Employees spend over 10 hours a week drafting emails, yet less than half of them are fully read, study says
Slack study found that many employees struggle with day-to-day emails
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A new study found that spending too much time on your emails might not be worth the stress.
Productivity platform Slack conducted a study of 8,000 U.S.- and U.K.-based small business employees — and the results were telling.
Those employees drafted an average of 112 emails each week, spending roughly 5½ minutes on each one — meaning they spent over 10 hours a week drafting emails, according to Slack's study.
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However, of those emails that are sent, only 36% of recipients actually fully read and understand the emails, according to the study.
Slack's head of UK & Ireland Deirdre Byrne said in a media statement that email "simply won’t die," even though it no longer fits some users’ purpose.
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"Employees at small businesses are losing a working day each week to drafting emails — which often go unread — at the expense of productive work," she said.
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The Slack study also found that 57% of people will not read an email if it’s longer than eight sentences.
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That means that many emails are going ignored.
Forty-six percent of employees surveyed believe that email is an "outdated" form of communication — and 50% say their emails are easily clogged by irrelevant emails.
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The general opinion about using email as a main form of communication varied depending on the employee's generation, according to the study.
Fifty-seven percent of Gen Z employees said email wasn’t worth the time and energy — while only 37% of Gen X and 34% of baby boomers agreed with that statement, according to Slack.
Byrne of Slack said that although email may never fully disappear, getting away from the "tyranny of the inbox … can make a massive difference to work today."
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The study, which was completed via72 Points and OnePoll, also shared other telling data points.
"Employees at small businesses are losing a working day each week to drafting emails — which often go unread — at the expense of productive work."
For instance, 51% of the employees surveyed have been addressed by the wrong name on email.
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And 47% of employees felt bogged down at work due to "menial" tasks like responding to emails.
And 36% of small business workers felt that their productivity would be positively impacted if their employer focused less on communicating via email.
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Slack senior vice president of product management Ali Rayl said that work structure has changed over the past years.
"We now have productivity platforms and job-specific tools at our fingertips to help us make the most of our time and talents," she said in a media statement.
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