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Reading Emails and Productivity

Photo credit: Photobin.

Are your employees spending too much time reading emails?  Many employees are constantly being interrupted by reading emails throughout the day resulting in a loss of productivity for the business.  Once interrupted by an email, some experts suggest that  employees can on occasion waste up to 30 minutes to get back to work again.  Many of these emails are from colleagues and not really that important.  As a result some businesses now do not allow employees to send emails to their colleagues and only to clients of the organisation.  However, since emails have become essential for daily, instant communication, some businesses even introduced instant messaging for employees to communicate with each other without having to send emails while file sharing through applications such as DropBox or similar  applications are encouraged.

What do managers need to do?  Depending on the nature of the business, it is perhaps a good idea to prioritise reading and sending emails of emails in the business.  Perhaps employees could read emails only twice a day and then have dedicated time to reply to all emails.   The rest of the time could be spent on urgent projects without having to constantly read and send emails.  Of course this might not be a viable solution for all businesses, especially those ones that need to be in constant contact with clients or employees who are organising projects.  But the reality is that in an age of instant communication and constantly availability, loss of productivity could the result for businesses.

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