Companies Share Tips On Managing Inbox Overload
Slogging through the daily onslaught of email slows workflow and interferes with productivity. Many people receive about 50 to 100 emails a day, according to a recent study by New York-based networking and data management company Varonis. It's not uncommon for some to spend up to 60 minutes a day just managing email.
“We had a client that actually had such a bad email problem, it was one person's job to sift through all of the junk email two hours a day; (that) CEO got to make sure he didn't miss an important email,” said Mike Mosher, senior engineer at technology support company Cinch IT of Worcester.
Creating filters that automatically send emails from a specific address, domain or with a certain subject line directly to a folder can help with clutter.
“I filter about 60 emails a day that I don't have to see right away,” Mosher said. He suggests creating a “Not Junk” folder in which newsletters or emails from partner companies and any other non-urgent mass mailings are automatically filed for later reading. Microsoft Outlook and Google's Gmail offer this filtering capability.
“Every time you look at your inbox, it eats up a minute of your day.” Mosher said.
New employees at The Davis Cos. would often complain to Alexander Everett, corporate systems analyst for the Marlborough-based staffing agency, about the overwhelming amount of email they received. He recalls one employee who couldn't begin working on his core duties because he was consumed by email until lunchtime, he said.
Now, Everett trains every employee within their first week on the job on managing email. He suggests first creating six folders, which may be labeled “Important,” “Follow up,” “Candidate” or “Client/Company.” Users can also automatically color-code messages from specific senders or companies through Outlook's rules function.
To keep up with the daily management of email, Everett teaches employees the Four D's: Delete, Do it, Delegate and Defer (if it takes more than two minutes and isn't time sensitive).
The Davis Cos.' protocols is an ongoing process that he continues to improve.
“For me personally ... I became over-organized and I had too many folders,” he said. “You don't want a folder for every little thing because you'll lose things.”
Utilizing your email system's search function to find specific messages is also key to developing email efficiency.
Cinch IT's chief technology officer, Michael Clark, archives emails every year and deletes all his deleted messages every time he closes Outlook.
“You can search just by an email address. You can search by to/from, subject or keyword or timeframe” even after a message is deleted, he said. Years ago, Cinch IT moved its company and clients email systems to a Woburn-based email hosting company, Reflexion Networks.
Reflexion provides cloud-based email archiving, valuable when it comes to litigation, because companies can track all emails, including deleted ones, as far back as seven years, Clark said.
Email 2.0
Some Davis teams coordinate sending and checking email at the end of every hour, which frees up the rest of the hour for other work.
“If we can get as many people doing the same thing at the same time, we're maximizing efficiency and productivity,” Everett said.
The staffing agency also adopted a customer relationship management (CRM) system — erecruit — in 2011, a networked system that allows multiple parties to update accounts.
“Using erecruit, we can enter everything in and not cc: if it's not time sensitive,” he said. “That's one thing that has drastically reduced email.”
Similarly, global information technology company Virtusa, based in Westborough, has launched several social platforms for communication among its 6,080 employees worldwide.
The company began to implement these new Facebook-like social platforms about a year and a half ago based on employee requests, said Sundararajan “Sundar” Narayanan, vice president and global head of human resources. Eighty-six percent of Virtusa's employees are “millennials,” born after 1980, and prefer social platforms, he said.
Therefore, the company purchased and developed systems such as Yammer, VHelp and VInnovate to address internal communication needs such as IT help requests and training tutorials.
The platforms have reduced Narayanan's email management about 30 percent, he said.
“I see it as customer satisfaction for my employees.”
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Image credit: FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
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