4 Reasons Why Email Can Be Detrimental in the Work Life and How to Solve Them

Email is one of the quickest and most convenient forms of communication in the workplace. It’s fast, painless, and takes out the awkwardness of having to talk directly to someone. However, there are a number of surprising downsides to using email too much at your workplace. Email can be a huge killer of productivity and end up wasting your time and money. The idea might sound a bit ludicrous, but try reading ahead and decide for yourself. Here are some ways that checking email during work can have disastrous consequences: 

1) Employees often have their inboxes spammed with messages. 

When you have dozens and dozens of messages flooding your inbox, it can become quite overwhelming. In the same way that your phone constantly buzzing or ringing can be very distracting, being bombarded with email messages can become very annoying.

The worst part is that many of these emails are useless. Some of them might just be CCs from the other employees working at the company. Others might just be spam and advertisements that you don’t want to read. Some of the messages might just be notifications as to what is trending on Facebook or information about your new Office Depot orders.

The best way to avoid such time wasting is the try and unsubscribe from as many notifications as you can. Use a service such as Unroll.Me to make sure that you rid yourself of unnecessary emails. When you sign  up for new websites, try using your personal email address rather than your professional work email address. Turn off notifications if necessary and ask co-workers to only bother you if the email needs to be responded to immediately. Alternatively, you could use a program like SaneBox or AwayFind to find the most important emails in your inbox.

2) Emails are a gigantic waste of time. 

Imagine if you only got paid time for that you were working and never got paid for the time at work that you wasted. That would mean that most employees would lose over one-fourth of their salary. A 2012 McKinsey survey found that employees waste about 28% of their time at work. That equates to about 13 hours a week. You could get two whole nights’ worth of sleep in that time. You could also watch Jacques Rivette’s French masterpiece Out 1, noli me tangere in that same time. You could finish a full season of a television show in that time.

Another important factor is that it takes an employee about 16 minutes to refocus their attention after being distracted by an email. This is because most employees are bad at multi-tasking and it is probably hard to do accounting work or any other kind of work while you are carrying on email conversations.

You can avoid this by setting aside times to check your email all at once. Try aiming for an empty inbox by checking and replying to all your emails at a fixed point in time during your day, preferably near the end of the day. This can knock out all of the messages at once and as fast as they can. Try keeping the responses short and sweet and avoid sending useless messages such as “Thank you” or “Got it.” Delete anything that’s unnecessary or forward emails to someone who is better at handling them.

3) Private information can sometimes be leaked. 

An email might not be as private as you assume it to be. With one simple click of the Forward button, your email could make its way to just about anyone in the world and you wouldn’t have a single clue, not until it’s too late. So, what are you sending in your emails? Meeting times? Phone numbers? Passwords? Business strategies? Credit card numbers? Social security?

Believe it or not, a company’s employees can be its own worst enemies. In February 213, Symantec found that half of employees who had been let go within the past twelve months had also kept confidential company data for themselves and that 40% of those employees planned on using that data to benefit the new company they were going to work for. What’s worse is that 56% of the study’s participants said that they believed it was not a crime to use private data to help a competing company and that 62% of respondents said it was okay to transfer company documents to personal devices such as tablets, phones, USBs, and laptops. The study also found that about half of businesses are not doing anything to prevent this from happening.

Make sure to archive all of your employee’s email activities after they leave so that you can monitor what they have done. Only give private data to the most trusted employees and use different passwords for all of your different accounts. For example, your employee’s company Outlook account shouldn’t have the same password as your company’s bank account. Make sure to change any passwords the employee knew after they leave as to prevent them from getting revenge by wrecking havoc on your company’s private accounts.

4) It can be difficult to separate business and personal email.

People who work too hard and too long often find their business lives being mixed into their personal lives. This is especially true for people who run family businesses out of their own homes. Sometimes it feels like you are still working even when you are taking the bus home or having dinner with your family. Many employees find themselves taking time away from their family answering calls from clients and bosses or staying late to complete projects the day before they are due. In fact, some employees believe that they might be eligible for overtime pay when they answer work emails outside of work.

This became a hotly debated issue in 2013 when Sergeant Jeffrey Allen filed a lawsuit against Chicago because he believed he and 200 other officers should receive overtime pay because they were all required to check their Blackberry phones while they were off duty. Chicago would be required to pay the officers $100 million for the officers’ overtime work if Allen and the other officers won their case.

You should avoid mixing your personal and business accounts. Maintain a separate work email account to handle your business contacts and have a personal email address for your social media and casual conversations. When you are off the clock, log out of your work email accounts or just avoid checking them. Tell your boss and co-workers not to send you messages unless they are of absolute importance.

If you are a boss, do not issue company smartphones to employees unless they are exempt from overtime. Encourage them not to check their emails at home and avoid sending them messages in order to be consistent.

In conclusion, emails may seem harmless, but they can be very damaging to your work life. They can consume your time and serve as a major distraction both inside and outside of work. Email may be more casual than phone calls and more convenient than talking in-person, but be sure not to waste too much time on the internet or you won’t be able to get any work done.