Business :: Ideas :: QuietInbox :: Market :: Research :: Electronic Excess: Microsoft research finds employees spend 11 hours a week handling emails
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“An employee receives on average 620 a week, with each email taking up roughly a minute of their time, this harms productivity," says National Technology Officer at Microsoft Israel
- Source: CTech by Calcalist
- Date Published: Jan 25, 2021
- Author: Maayan Manela
- Spokesperson: Dr. Tomer Simon, National Technology Officer, Microsoft Israel
- Employees spend 11 hours per week managing and organizing email.
- The average worker receives 620 emails weekly.
- Each email takes ~1 minute, often without requiring any action.
- 28% of work time is spent reading or responding to emails.
- 85% of emails are read on phones but 75% are answered on computers.
- 90% of people check email on their phones in mornings and evenings, but reply via desktop during the day.
- Email triage is a major pain point: employees procrastinate, creating a backlog.
“This harms productivity because the email may not even require the employee to take action and they were simply CC’d on it.”
— Dr. Tomer Simon, Microsoft Israel
- The volume of emails has decreased by 10% in recent years (internal emails).
- Global usage is still rising (e.g., 100M new users annually in India).
- Email is hard to replace in regulated environments due to e-discovery compliance.
