Employees Open Only 60% Of The Emails They Get: Study

Inbox clutter is on the rise -- so much so that professionals are opening fewer emails than they once did, according to State of Email, a report by Hiver.

Employees opened only 60% of the emails they received in 2018 compared to 75% the year before. And they replied to only one in ten messages.

Yet work email volume rose by 13%, with employees now getting almost 180 emails per day. They spend 33% of their time reading and writing emails.

Based on the average Bay Area tech salary of $142,000, staffers are being paid $47,000 per year to send emails, the study estimates. 

 “When people do not even read 40% of emails they receive, it’s a big sign that everyone is wrong way too many emails,” it notes.

The problem is that many emails are irrelevant -- a waste of time.

For example, 10% of the emails in the average employee’s inbox are messages on which they are being copied. People reply to 25% of these. And that response number dropped by 25% between 2017 and 2018.

In addition, 19% are emails are being forwarded to the recipient. People reply to only 20% of these, and that rate is falling.

Another 13/% hit the inbox because they are part of a distribution list or an email group. Only 16% of these are ever answered -- and in 2018, the number that people actually red fell by 24% YOY.  

 “There is a disconnect in which people are sending more emails, yet opening and responding to fewer of them,” states Niraj Rout, co-founder and CEO of Hiver. “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.”

Hiver, the provider of an email collaboration platform, studied 1,000 email accounts of employees tat firms that use Hiver as a collaboration platform. For this report, it processed 300,000 email threads and 4.7 million emails, it says. The company is based in San one and Bangalore.

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