Email is considered a critical component of communicating within the business world; however, email is notorious for costing employees valuable time and productivity every day. In fact, employees receive a daily average of 123 emails and spend approximately 6.3 hours of their day on sending, receiving, and reading their emails.
Email has devolved into a time-wasting tool for business that, if left unchecked, can result in: bottlenecks preventing information sharing; communication breakdowns; low employee productivity; and lost time and money.
Minimizing the use of email and making it more efficient is the key to navigating this hurdle. Employees need to spend less time managing email and trawling through messages to find information. This has become even more urgent with the shift to remote working, as employees can't communicate face to face.
Collaboration tools build business productivity
For your employees to improve their productivity levels and focus on deep work and creative tasks, they need to minimize the time they spend on emails. By incorporating a collaboration tool, such as Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, into your organization, you can streamline the process of communicating and sharing information.
The fact is, email isn't likely to be going anywhere anytime soon. It's convenient and reliable, making it the default option for most businesses. In fact, email use is likely to continue to grow, potentially reaching more than 333 billion emails sent and received per day by 2022. The number of users will grow to 4.2 billion in 2022.
Therefore, organizations need to find a solution to the email challenge that doesn't require them to eliminate email use altogether. Instead, they need a tool that enhances collaboration and can seamlessly connect with people's emails.
Email is often used to send attachments, which are usually documents that are important to the business. This can include contracts, memorandums of understanding, policies, plans, blueprints, and many more. These attachments are crucial to the organization but can often become siloed away in people's email inboxes. When others in the team need access, it can be impossible to find the latest versions and ensure everyone is working with the same information.
A collaboration tool can fix this by making it easy to save attachments into a location that is secure, searchable, and, most importantly, accessible by any authorized person. This removes the need for manual follow-up, team members asking each other for the latest version of the document, or errors that occur when people are working with different document versions.
It's important to choose an easy-to-use tool so your employees can adapt to it faster and start improving their productivity straight away. Tools like Microsoft SharePoint can fit the bill perfectly. However, if employees aren't used to using SharePoint and the sites within SharePoint are unfamiliar to them, they may avoid using it. This means you may not see a strong return on your investment in the platform and employees will continue to waste time managing documents inefficiently. Therefore, you need to buttress your implementation of SharePoint with a collaboration tool that makes it so easy to use that your employees won't even consider using anything else.
OnePlace Solutions offers a plug-in that seamlessly connects your team's Outlook inboxes with the relevant SharePoint sites. With drag-and-drop functionality and integrated capabilities, OnePlaceMail lets employees manage information effectively without wasting any time. Instead of managing emails, they can focus on their core tasks, which delivers more value to the business.
Overall, this will reduce the amount of time spent managing and sending emails, while also improving employees' visibility into and access to information, and facilitate a more productive workflow for the business to achieve success.
To find out more about how OnePlace Solutions can turn your collaboration solution, like Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, into a powerhouse of collaboration and efficiency, and reduce the amount of time employees spend on email, contact us today.
