Workers Can't (or Won't) Escape From Their eMail

Do you sometimes feel as if you're perpetually buried inside your inbox? Join the club. Despite the massive popularity of social media, we spend a staggering amount of hours sorting, reading and sending email, according to a recent survey from Mimecast. eMail isn't simply a person-to-person communications tool. It's also handy as a search engine and file-storage option, findings show. Sometimes, it's a viable alternative to in-person "face time" at the office, as four of 10 information professionals say they regularly send and receive work-related emails outside of normal hours, and one-quarter admit that they've sent emails late in the evening purely to "show commitment" to the job. "While email is not perfect, it seems that information workers are reluctant to adopt other social tools if it means they have to leave their inbox behind," says Peter Bauer, CEO and co-founder of Mimecast, a supplier of cloud-based email solutions. "Therefore, rather than trying to entice users away from email and on to other platforms, IT teams should introduce new, inbox-friendly collaboration tools and make the data stored within the archive more accessible." An estimated 2,500 information workers in the United States, United Kingdom and South Africa took part in the research.

READ MORE