How email clogs the works

The Life: Too many executives are a slave to technology. Tommy Weir, our leadership expert, analyses the weekly cost of checking email on managerial time.

Email dilemma: dealing with the daily managerial inbox is becoming increasingly time-consuming and costly to businesses. istockphoto.com

I remember being told that email would make life simpler.

But instead, I feel like I have become a slave to technology. And I am not unique.

For months, I have listened to executives complain their inboxes are out of control. When asked what leaders feel they need to do less of, their response - without fail - is email.

Is email a tool of productivity?

I think not, considering that on average executives receive and send about 150 emails per day. To really understand the productivity impact of email, let us analyse the weekly cost of email on managerial time.

For an organisation with 1,000 employees, I have calculated the weekly cost of managerial email alone is Dh437,500 (US$119,105), or Dh22.7 million each year. The simple task of answering and sending email is very costly in time when you consider the monetary value of it.

You may be wondering how to calculate the exact cost of email in your organisation. Here is the model I used: if a workforce has 1,000 employees, then there are on average 200 people, or 20 per cent of the total workforce, in managerial or leadership roles.

If each manager or leader receives and sends 150 emails per day, then they are spending at least 1 minute per email, or 2.5 hours each day in their inbox.

In my aforementioned example, I used the average cost per manager - of Dh30,000 per month - in order to determine the hourly cost for email (Dh175). Then I calculated the total number of man-hours collectively spent per week on email - 40,000 hours - and multiplied these together to find out just how expensive checking email is.

Is this how leaders should be spending their time?

Organisational leaders are now a slave to the inbox for at least 2.5 hours per day. The prime culprit in this email trap, I believe, is the misuse of what is known as "CC".

Originally, back in the days of letters, "CC" stood for "carbon copy". Because making a carbon copy took extra effort, it was used sparingly and professionally. A carbon copy of a letter was only used in matters of necessity.

Today, it seems that CC has been replaced with "CYA" - an acronym commonly used to describe covering yourself but with a cruder translation. The ease of using CC in email means employees are costing organisations millions of dirhams in productive time.

And it looks like this is just the tip of the productivity problem, as executives all across the region are allowing their best hours to be controlled by someone else - and, more specifically, whoever is dropping a message into the inbox.

Being tied to the inbox and operating in a culture that expects emails to be answered instantaneously, even in the evenings through the BlackBerry, is becoming a very dangerous practice. Time spent thinking, leading, motivating and communicating is being replaced by "doing email".

Organisations need to take control of the email usage and improve their productivity. The simplest way is to run an email audit and determine the cost of email in an organisation. The scary facts will lead to action.

Tommy Weir is an authority on fast-growth and emerging-market leadership, the author of The CEO Shift and the managing director of the Emerging Market Leadership Center