Is Email Useful?

What role does email play in your collaboration with co-workers and in getting your day-to-day job done? Jessica Stillman at WebWorkerDaily highlights two recent studies that weigh in on the quality of work emails, and both give the usefulness of this now-traditional form of online communication pretty low marks.

One study of 500 IT professionals, from email security and archiving firm Mimecast, found that just one in four work emails is essential and just one in three holds immediate value. An average of 11 percent of email in respondents’ inboxes was personal, while 7 percent was spam and 63 percent was internal, employee-to-employee communication, the study found.

Meanwhile, the second study, from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, examined hundreds of thousands of emails from the former Enron Corp., in large part to look for company gossip. Nearly 15 percent of emails at Enron contained gossip. The gossip was common at all levels of the corporate ladder, but lower levels were more likely to participate. Not surprisingly, negative gossip was 2.7 times more common than positive gossip.

Stillman asks why knowledge workers continue to rely on email so heavily when it has obvious downsides. What do you think? How useful is email in your office, and is there a better tool your agency or office uses to collaborate?