How Technology thwarts Email Flooding, Nourishing Employee Experience

By CIOReview | Thursday, June 6, 2019

FREMONT, CA: Emails are one of the most-used means of communication ever. Every organization depends on emails to a large extent for internal communications. As helpful and efficient as emails are, they can also cause harm to employees if not used cautiously. To prevent the simple medium of communication from becoming an overused tool, companies must understand how the system works. Only then can the management take conscious steps towards fixing everything that could be wrong with excessive email usage.

A significant cause of concern is information overload on the employees, which subsequently affects productivity. Limiting the number of emails is a possible solution that companies can adopt. A significant advantage of emails was their reach, but the same can transform into a disadvantage as well. With the increasing use of personal smart devices, emails have become accessible even outside the range of working area. This endangers the personal space of employees and causes stress. The management should ensure that employees don't access official emails once they leave the premises allowing them to relax.

Emails in the workplace demand the immediate attention of the employees, which can disrupt concentration and delay tasks. Productivity can suffer because of this, and employees need to understand that spending time on unnecessary emails does not work in their favor. As a remedy, the authority should try not to use emails as a tool for employee engagement and limit the usage only to convey crucial work-related information.

The management should also refrain from sending notifications or reminders over emails. Chatbots can do the same work in a better way. Going through emails might require employees to multitask. Although multitasking is useful to an extent, emails might cause the time to be wasted as employee switch from one platform to the next without any urgent need. A unified platform of communication with consolidated data is beneficial. A few steps could make the difference between emails being an effective tool or a distractive one.