Employees do not open 40% of emails they receive at workplace: Survey

A new survey finds office employees do not open as much as 40 per cent of emails they receive. According to Hiver's first annual report titled State of Email, an average professional receives around 180 emails every day. As part of this survey, the data was collated from almost 1,000 email accounts of employees from across companies. Hiver said it processed 3,00,000 email threads and 4.7 million emails for the report.

What does it mean?

As per the report, an average employee receives close to 180 emails every day and 40 per cent of them are not even opened. In fact, for emails that are opened, the reply rate is just 16 per cent. The survey report on email behaviour at the workplace highlights that a widespread misuse of email has led to unwanted inbox clutter, the company said in a statement. The biggest contributor to email overload is group emails sent to shared inboxes or distribution lists (such as HYPERLINK "mailto:info@company.com"info@company.com).

Survey findings

-- Employees do not open as much as 40 per cent of emails they receive at their workplace

-- An average professional receives around 180 emails every day

-- 40 per cent of emails received by employees are not even opened

-- Emails that are opened contribute to only 16 per cent of total emails received

-- 51 per cent of emails people receive are group emails.

As the report highlights, the problem could be every employee who is a part of that group receives a copy of each email in their primary inbox.

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"Email clearly remains an essential and popular way of communicating, but there are a number of findings from the Hiver State of Email report that indicates that it is broken and requires a significant rehaul," Niraj Rout, co-founder and CEO of Hiver said.

The report also brings attention to "irresponsible" CC'ing, which has become a standard in virtually every email for reasons ranging from keeping people updated on specific projects to account for their work with their managers. Another major contributor to the inbox clutter situation is the unnecessary and excessive forwarding of emails.

"There is a disconnect in which people are sending more emails, yet opening and responding to fewer of them. The low response and read rates for Cc and forwarded emails demonstrate that while people want to use email as a collaboration tool, it was clearly not designed for it," Rout added.

(With PTI inputs)