Australian workers waste 58 minutes a day on email

MacroView has released research showing Australian workers spend 58 minutes a day on email administration beyond reading and responding. The findings point to a broader problem in how organisations store and retrieve business information.

The study, conducted by Antenna for the Australian technology company, estimated workers spend 105 minutes each workday on email-related activity. Of that, about 47 minutes is spent reading and replying. The rest goes on filing and saving emails, searching for attachments and documents, recreating information, and deciding where material should be stored.

Alongside the research, MacroView launched a new Microsoft 365 email filing product, SureFile. The software is designed to reduce the manual work involved in saving emails and attachments that organisations need to keep.

The research found 78 per cent of workers had experienced or witnessed a problem caused by emails or documents being hard to find. Almost half, 48 per cent, had seen time wasted searching for information, while 28 per cent had seen missed follow-ups or delayed responses.

The findings also suggest many employers lack clear processes for handling email records. Some 37 per cent of respondents said their organisation had no process for saving or filing work emails and attachments, while a further 27 per cent said a manual process existed but was not properly followed.

One in 10 workers said they had witnessed a compliance, audit, privacy, security or legal concern involving an email, attachment or document that was difficult to locate. The report also found one in four workers leave important emails in their inbox and rely on search to find them later.

That approach can create problems when staff are away, move to another role or leave the business. It also leaves key information in personal inboxes rather than systems other teams can access.

Colin Titmuss, Chief Executive Officer at MacroView, said the figures showed how much administrative work had built up around email.

"Almost an hour a day is being absorbed by the administration around email, before you even consider the time people spend actually reading and responding to messages," Titmuss said.

"Not all of that time is avoidable, but it shows how much manual friction has built up around one of the most important business systems organisations use every day.

"Even if we take a conservative view of 10 minutes being avoidable administrative time per employee per day, that equates to $2,070 per employee per year. For a 150-person organisation, that is $310,500 annually. For a 500-person organisation, it is more than $1 million."

The estimate is based on a labour cost of AUD $54 an hour and 230 working days a year. On that basis, recovering a small amount of time across a workforce could translate into a sizeable annual saving for employers.

Compliance risks

Titmuss said the issue went beyond productivity and raised questions about how organisations control business records.

"Email is where decisions are made, approvals are given, documents are exchanged and client history is captured," he said.

"But too often that information is left in personal inboxes or relies on individuals to manually save it in the right place.

"If business-critical information only lives in one person's inbox, it is not really under organisational control."

SureFile is available in two versions: a cloud-based edition and a desktop edition built into classic Outlook. MacroView said the cloud version can continue filing emails when a user is offline, on leave or has left the organisation.

The product works by linking an email to a client, matter or project, after which the filing takes place automatically in Microsoft 365. Future replies in the same thread can then be captured in the relevant location without staff having to save each message manually.

Titmuss said organisations would need to make information management easier rather than rely on staff to carry out more manual filing.

"The organisations that get email chaos under control will be those that make information-management behaviour easier and automatic, rather than relying on already-busy employees to file everything manually," he said.

"With SureFile, a user can associate an email with a client, matter or project and the filing happens automatically in the background. That email and future replies in the same thread can then be captured in the appropriate Microsoft 365 location without someone repeatedly filing each message manually.

"That means less administrative effort for employees and a more complete, consistent record for the organisation."