Half of employees globally are struggling to manage a daily flood of information – and worldwide email accounts are set to rise from 3.3 billion to 4.3 billion by 2016.

The situation is so bad that the world is heading for what some observers have dubbed “information breaking point.”

Alarmingly, 8 out of 10 professionals admit to deleting or discarding work information without fully reading it according to a Lexis Nexis survey.

This inability to quickly deal with emails means that the quality of the work staff do achieve suffers.
Aside from a sheer waste of time this trend has other IT implications.

Email overload can lead staff to submit incomplete documents, emails, or other communications because the necessary information or materials could not be found on time.

Often staff need to recreate a document because a previously created version could not be found – and they rely on IT to step in and resolve the issue.

Email overload will continue to negatively impact employee productivity and IT resources – if companies choose to ignore the issue. 

The heavy toll on employee productivity will eventually come to bear on profitability – and organisations will one way or another come under increasing pressure to resolve email management issues through behavioural interventions.

The question is who will pick up the mantle – will it be HR? Training? Or IT? Watch out for future blogs addressing this question.