New Year’s survey reveals only one in five resolve to limit email usage outside work hours
2011-01-03
A new survey by Intermedia, the world’s largest Microsoft hosted Exchange provider, reveals the top business communications New Year’s resolutions for 2011. The survey – conducted by Harris Research on behalf of Intermedia – found that three in five respondents1 resolve to be more organized and productive. Only one in five resolves to unplug from email in their time off from work. The findings lead to the notion that American workers are focused on getting more done in 2011.
The full results of the New Year’s resolution survey include:
- Get Organized: 61 percent of respondents pledge to keep their business emails and documents more organized in the new year.
- Respond Faster: 37 percent will try to be better about promptly responding to business emails and calls.
- Work After Hours: Only 19 percent of workers want to cut down on addressing business emails or voicemails during their time off work.
It is estimated that 247 billion emails are sent per day (according to Pingdom). Rather than cutting back, US workers are focused on how to get more out of business communications activity. By pledging to stay organized, Americans are ready to become more productive in our post-recession economy.
"The question is what tools do workers have to contend with email, voicemail, phone calls –really a proliferation of message volume and channels," says Jonathan McCormick, COO, Intermedia. "There are options you can personally undertake to improve your productivity – like automatically filtering newsletters and non-urgent material to particular files. Companies are also giving workers the convenience of accessing all their communication tools – email, office phone calls and voicemail, instant messaging – right from their smartphones."
The business communications experts at Intermedia have some tips to offer for the New Year:
- Work off your business priorities, not your email inbox. Highly productive workers use email as a communication tool for business results, rather than responding to emails as they come in. Focus on what needs to get done for your job and prioritize email review and response with that in mind.
- Collaborate online rather than simply sending messages back and forth. Email is great for communication, but not always the best tool for collaboration – like working on editing documents or giving employees central access to the same files. Tools for document management solve this problem and are available online.
- Unify communications to get back one hour of your life per day. Rather than use separate tools and devices to check email, make phone calls, and instant message colleagues, businesses increasingly use “unified communications” to combine them in one tool – often Microsoft Outlook. Sage Research estimates this system can increase productivity by over 12.5 percent, or one hour per day for each worker.
1 Respondents are employed US adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution. This survey was conducted online in December, 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia.