The average worker spends an estimated 28% of the workweek managing emails and receives an average of 121 emails per day. For many of us, the thought of abandoning email seems about as likely as giving up the air we breathe. It’s necessary for survival. It’s necessary to maintain our everyday lives.
But believe it or not, the days of communicating via email are numbered. The world of communication is shifting, and email is no longer the optimal tool for rapid, ongoing, productive conversations. Email is simply not meant to be a task management or collaboration tool. The fast-paced environment we all live in and the growing number of remote and decentralized teams have driven the need for more social, instant communication tools that increase productivity, not drag us down.
So if your team is still chained to email as your primary form of communication, it’s time to embrace this change. Not only will your team significantly increase productivity, but your team’s collaboration efforts will also become much more efficient.
Here are four reasons why your team should ditch email altogether.
1. Team productivity will increase
Email has become a severe productivity killer. It’s always on and always there to distract us. By reducing the time spent both sending and receiving email, your team will instantly see an improvement in productivity.
For many of today’s teams, it’s not possible to get together for a meeting every day or every week, so there needs to be a way to communicate and discuss ideas on a regular basis, without these interactions becoming a major time suck.
This is where the wonderful world of collaboration tools come in. These innovative tools have replaced the need to search your email inbox every time you need to find answers to important questions. Instead, information is organized into unified channels or chats and documents can be readily attached and accessible across an organization. There are task-tracking tools (Trello), corporate messengers (Slack) and content approval tools (Gain) that are replacing the need to perform all of these tasks in an email.
By finding a collaboration tool that works for your team, email can become more of a notification center and less of a black hole of wasted time.
2. Team confusion will decrease
How many times have you simply lost information because of email forwarding, CC’s, or missing file attachments? Digging through email threads, especially those with more than two team members, can be time-consuming and frustrating.
Furthermore, when new team members are looped into an existing email thread, this can cause an entirely new set of problems. Side conversations begin and cannot be managed, or a project can take much longer to complete if your team is completely collaborating on a project in an email thread and you cannot easily visualize the final product.
Eliminating email and instead using a tool where all information can be easily accessed by all of the right people, your team can greatly reduce the confusions that are caused by chaotic emailing.
3. Your team will save enormous amounts of time
Emails are a waste of time. It’s not uncommon for some of us to spend a whopping 6 hours a day checking email and trying to reach “inbox 0” has become a new source of stress for everyone. Our culture of “always online” and the need for faster and faster response times has made checking work email during non-working hours the new norm. In a study by Adobe, 50% of people routinely check their email while in bed, 18% while driving, and 50% while on vacation.
Source: Adobe.com
This high level of expectation that we should always be checking and responding to email messages not only leads to stress, but can also lead to a decrease in productivity overall. Each time you receive a new email from a team member and have to cut away from your work to read and respond, it can take many minutes to get refocused on your work again.
4. Your team will develop more efficient ways to collaborate
Let’s be honest: email is not meant to be a collaboration tool. When your team starts using email for instant messaging, reviews and approvals, or one of the many other forms of time-sensitive communication, collaboration and productivity suffer.
By moving your team away from email, you will notice true collaboration and productivity take place. Repetitive tasks will be reduced, confusion will be lowered, and you’ll realize you don’t need to use email for every little thing. There are so many collaboration tools that can help your team stay informed and stay organized. Once you find one that works, your team will start saving hours on collaboration processes.
Undoubtedly email is changing. It’s simply not dynamic enough to support the demand for instant, ongoing, and even visual, team collaboration. If your organization needs a significant boost in productivity, take a look at your email inbox. There’s definitely a better way. Join the hundreds of teams that have ditched email to better their collaboration efforts and approval processes with Gain!
