How to resolve AdBlock issue? Hidden admin burden of hard-to-find email a huge drag on Australia’s productivity
NEW RESEARCH into fundamental email management has proven it remains one of the biggest drags on business productivity across Australia.
Australian workers spend almost an hour a day just administering email, according to new research by Australian email management technology company MacroView, conducted by independent consumer research agency Antenna.
The research found Australian workers spent an estimated 58 minutes every workday on email administration beyond simply reading and responding, according to research that examined the hidden cost of unmanaged email. Antenna’s research found workers spent an estimated 105 minutes a day on email-related activity overall.
While around 47 minutes is spent reading and responding, the remainder is consumed by tasks such as filing and saving emails, searching for attachments and documents, recreating information and deciding where material should be stored.
Bring Back the Calm: The Cost of Chaos Index developed from the research, revealed that even a fraction of the administrative burden of email-related activity can add up quickly, with a conservative 10 minutes of time being avoidable per employee per day, resulting in more than $1 million dollars a year in lost productivity for an organisation of 500.
This is based on a labour cost of $54 per hour (drawn from ABS data) and a conservative rounded estimate of there being 230 working days per year. 
Improperly managed email drains businesses
MacroView chief executive officer, Colin Titmuss said the report demonstrated just how much email had become a significant source of hidden administrative workload and how it was not only an individual productivity problem but a business systems issue.
“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,” Mr 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.”
Research used to create SureFile solution
The report was launched alongside MacroView’s new Microsoft 365 email filing solution designed to reduce the manual work involved in saving business-critical emails and attachments, SureFile.
The research also found that more than three-in-four workers (78%) have experienced or witnessed a problem caused by hard-to-find emails or documents.
Almost half (48%) have seen time wasted searching for information. More than one-in-four (28%) have seen missed follow-ups or delayed responses.
More than a third (37%) said their organisation had no process for saving or filing work emails and attachments, while another 27% said a manual process existed but was not properly followed.
One in 10 workers have witnessed a compliance, audit, privacy, security or legal concern where an email, attachment or document was hard to find.
Compliance difficult from disorganised email
Mr Titmuss said the issue extended beyond lost productivity. Exposures also created potentially expensive compliance issues and lost revenue from missed business opportunities.
“Email is where decisions are made, approvals are given, documents are exchanged and client history is captured,” Mr Titmuss 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,” he said.
The report said one-in-four workers left important emails in their inbox and relied on search to find them later, creating risks when employees are away, change roles or leave the organisation.
Cost of chaos is real
The Cost of Chaos Index argued that the solution was not to ask employees to spend more time manually filing email, but to remove the friction from the process. SureFile has been custom developed by MacroView to help companies properly organise email across the organisation to boost productivity and improve decision-making.
“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,” Mr Titmuss 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.”
Mr Titmuss said SureFile was available in an enterprise version – which operates in the cloud and can continue filing emails even when a user is offline, on leave or has left the organisation – and a desktop version built into classic Microsoft Outlook.
He said the solution was designed to centrally capture important correspondence in Microsoft 365, reducing reliance on individual filing habits and improving the findability of business-critical information.
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