email - Blogs - DPG Community2024-03-29T15:57:44Zhttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/feed/tag/emailImagine a World Without Emailhttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/imagine-a-world-without-email2018-10-04T15:54:17.000Z2018-10-04T15:54:17.000ZAdy Howeshttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/members/AdyHowes<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/127795039?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p><strong>Just imagine a world without email.</strong></p>
<p>For some, cold sweats might already start breaking out as they wonder how we’d survive. Others might be doing a jig as they imagine a world where they no longer must step on the treadmill that email has become.</p>
<p>How did we get here? How have we found ourselves in a position where a technology devised in the seventies is still the method of communication so many seem to rely on?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>I dream of a world without email.</strong></p>
<p>Email has become my least preferred method of communication.  I can’t shake off the feeling that we’d all be better off without it. Don’t get me wrong, I get some lovely emails. Being community manager here at DPG many people contact me with feedback, questions and ideas. Those emails, I could receive all day long.</p>
<p>Most people I talk to though are trapped under a constant swamp of emails ping-ponging with threads, replies and follow ups with discussion that span over days, weeks or even months. Stuff just takes too long. Wouldn’t it have been quicker to just talk?</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>The statstics tell me...</strong></p>
<p>Yes. It would have been quicker. For a while now, I’ve been looking at data on my own personal email. Sad, but true! Currently, my average response time to an email is four and a half days. It’s quicker to send me a letter! To make it worse, consistently more than 95% of emails I don’t even reply to.</p>
<p>Yet on my professional emails I know that I just wouldn’t get away with that level of performance. I don’t want to let people down or ignore people. That’s not my thing. I want to be part of the conversation and there to help.</p>
<p>So instead, probably just like you, I spend hours working with email. Sifting, organising, prioritising, replying and deleting. It’s one hell of an in-tray isn’t it? A bottomless pit. Then there’s that overwhelming feeling when you return from holiday knowing another pile is waiting for you. The carefully crafted <a href="https://ooogenerator.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">out of office message</a> has done zilch to discourage people from adding another few to the pile.</p>
<p>But what about the impacts to the organisations we work for? Multiply the number of employees by the hours spent on email and you’re running into some serious cost, right? And what about communication? What sort of barrier is created when we choose to write to people rather than speak to them? That’s not healthy for interpersonal relationships, team work or collaboration is it?</p>
<p>The customer experience is often shot too. I see organisations create email address after email address after email address of different points of contact for customers to use depending on the nature of their enquiry. A whole directory of email addresses. Putting my customer hat on, is it really my job to figure out your complex communication pathways so that my enquiry gets diverted to the right desk?</p>
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<p><strong>What are the alternatives to email?</strong></p>
<p>A couple of weeks ago, I was exploring <a href="https://twitter.com/i/moments/1040991145948573696" target="_blank" rel="noopener">alternatives to email</a> in a conversation with my personal learning network and I got some interesting responses. Getting off the email bandwagon is something many are trying to do. Here at DPG we’re on a continued journey of digital transformation using tools like Slack and Trello to help us collaborate as an alternative to email. We make it easy for our customers with alternatives too. Our online DPG Community is a great place to connect and discuss in small study groups or as part of a wider network of almost 10,000 professionals. We also use our channels on <a href="https://twitter.com/dpgplc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/development-processes-group-plc/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Linked In</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/dpgplc" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Facebook</a> as ways to interact with our brand.</p>
<p>The video I’ve just posted in the <a href="https://community.dpgplc.co.uk/the-LD-zone" target="_blank" rel="noopener">L&D Zone</a>, ‘Outside the Inbox’, was made by Luis Suarez a few years ago. He’s a guy I’ve certainly learned a lot from when it comes to communicating in today’s modern organisations beyond email.</p>
<p>It’s well worth a watch.</p>
<p>And once you have….. imagine a world without email.</p>
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<div class="video-container"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gnv6K5JmpTM?rel=0" width="853" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></div>
</div>Are you wasting your employees’ time at work?https://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/are-you-wasting-your-employees-time-at-work2016-03-31T10:12:56.000Z2016-03-31T10:12:56.000ZMike Collinshttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/members/MikeCollins<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2216838?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>UK businesses would be £750 million better off each year if only they could help employees manage their time more effectively.</p>
<p>New research, called ‘<a href="http://www.digitalnewsroom.co.uk/uploads/2016/03/UK-DST-Report-Final.pdf" target="_blank">Unlocking the UK’s Daily Savings Time</a>’, claims that UK businesses lose an average of two hours of their employees’ working time every working day. Multiply those lost hours in the working week and it amounts to 11.4 hours a week. This costs employers £11,225 per employee every year, according to an ICD White Paper ‘<a href="http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/acrobat/idc-bridging-productivity-gap-white-paper.html" target="_blank">Bridging the Information Worker Productivity Gap in Western Europe: New Challenges and Opportunities for IT</a>’.</p>
<p>How are those hours lost?</p>
<p>Through unnecessary activities and inefficient processes, according to Clare Evans, time management expert and author of Time Management for Dummies. Evans conducted the ‘Unlocking the UK’s Daily Savings Time’ research on behalf of Workfront, a provider of cloud-based solutions.</p>
<p>What are the main findings from the research?</p>
<p>– less than 60% of the working day is spent on productive activity<br />
– email is a big time waster, with the result that UK businesses lose £1.5 billion a year<br />
– Only 14% of emails are crucial to work activity, yet emails chew up 50% of the average office workers’ time</p>
<p>– 57% of office workers spend an hour a day looking for missing documents<br />
– 20% have to recreate documents that they couldn’t find<br />
– 56% of workers feel overwhelmed and there are three factors that are contributing to this: a lack of planning, changing priorities and limited resources</p>
<p>How can HR professionals, line managers and employees themselves overcome this situation? Naturally, Workfront recommends that organisations implement more effective, innovative systems and processes in the workplace. HR should definitely consider this and look at how processes can be made more efficient and more user friendly.</p>
<p>The report went on to identify four top productivity killers in the modern workplace. They are:</p>
<p>1. <strong>Meetings.</strong> Professionals attend an average of 60 meetings each month, with managers complaining that 30% of their time in meetings is wasted<br />
– Impromptu, drop-by meetings also account for a lot of lost working hours. 40% of workers cited them as productivity killers<br />
– Then there’s the time spent preparing for meetings, travelling to meetings and on follow up actions</p>
<p>2. <strong>Email.</strong> Workers spend four hours a day checking and managing their email, says Evans. The average office worker receives 300 plus work emails each week, with many senior managers sending and receiving over 122 emails every day, according to the Radicati Email Statistics Report 2015-2019.</p>
<p>3. <strong>Distractions and Interruptions.</strong> Every time someone is interrupted at work, it takes several minutes to return to the task they were concentrating on and yet, 80% of interruptions are trivial, according to ‘Why & How Your Employees Waste Time at Work’, a salary.com survey. Another survey, this time by IT consulting company, Basex, claims that every employee loses 2.1 hours every day as a result of distractions and interruptions in the workplace.</p>
<p>4. <strong>Poor systems and processes.</strong> This includes systems or tools that are outdated, not synched or not connected across multiple teams when they need to be.</p>
<p><em><strong>Do you agree with the report and the four top productivity killers?</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>How can we overcome these things?</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>We'd love to hear your thoughts and any experiences you've had on improving productivity</strong></em></p>
</div>The State of Enterprise Workhttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/blog/the-state-of-enterprise-work2014-11-24T15:59:06.000Z2014-11-24T15:59:06.000ZMike Collinshttps://community.dpgplc.co.uk/members/MikeCollins<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/2216334?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>In this report published in October 2014 by <a href="http://www.attask.com/home-page-alt" target="_blank">AtAsk</a> you can see the results of a large study in to Enterprise Work.</p>
<p>The report covers some interesting topic areas that are summarised in the fantastic infographic below </p>
<p>Take a look and see if the results from the study ring any bells in terms of how you believe your workforce currently operates and how they approach their work.</p>
<p>Would welcome any thoughts in comments below.</p>
<p>You can download the detailed report <a href="http://www.attask.com/enterprise/resource/whitepaper/state-enterprise-work" target="_blank">here</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.attask.com/enterprise/resource/infographic/state-of-enterprise-work"><img src="http://cdn.attask.com/resources/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/10/state-of-work-infographic_final-1.jpg" alt="The Joys and Struggles of Enterprise Workers" title="The Joys and Struggles of Enterprise Workers" border="0" /></a></p>
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