Samanage Survey Shows Employees Squander More Than a Month Each Year Checking Email Outside of Work Hours

CARY, N.C., April 21, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- New data released today found that U.S. employees are spending a significant amount of time checking email after hours. In fact, a large portion of workers are spending far more time emailing outside the office than they do taking vacation, according to the survey findings from Samanage, a SaaS Enterprise Service Management company.

Among the 1,500 U.S. adults surveyed in the "Email Overload Survey," more than one in three (35.2 percent) check email at least one hour a day outside of work hours, totaling more than 30 days of extra work per year. Given the average U.S. worker receives 10 days of vacation annually [1], employees are spending triple the amount of time emailing after work hours versus taking vacation.

It's clear that Americans have a hard time putting down their mobile device and stepping away from email as respondents reported checking their work email instead of sleeping or eating. One in five respondents (19.2 percent) noted that they wake up to check work email "very often," while nearly 24 percent check email "very often" during dinner. Millennials are the biggest offenders in both categories. When it comes to losing sleep over email, nearly 40 percent (39.4 percent) of Millennials said they have woken up to check work email.

Additional findings:

• Nearly one in five employees (18.9 percent) receive more than 100 emails on a daily basis.
• The top two reasons U.S. adults check work email after hours are to "stay organized" and "feel connected to work."
• Twenty percent of respondents expressed negative feelings toward opening their inbox outside the office, admitting to feeling "overwhelmed" and "frustrated."
• More than one in three (39.1 percent) of employees do not have control settings in place to manage after-hours email. However, nearly half of young Millennials age 18-24 (47.3 percent) use advanced email settings to control, automate or organize their email compared to 32.2 percent to Baby Boomers age 65+.
• The top ways people would prefer to organize email to control after hours email interruptions include:
  • Having senders only flag emails that need a response (40.4 percent)
  • Holding all emails outside of work hours (13.7 percent)
  • Setting automatic replies for certain senders (10 percent)

"Work email is disrupting the personal lives of U.S. employees, causing workers unwanted stress and anxiety," said Cord Silverstein, vice president of Marketing at Samanage. "Organizations should take this as a wakeup call that they need to be smarter about assisting employees in the management of corporate communications to avoid overload and prevent employee turnover."

About Samanage
Samanage offers a SaaS Enterprise Service Management platform that helps make work life better by streamlining business service requests and delivery processes across any organization. Samanage stands alone with its ability to provide remarkable visibility into IT service and asset management for better measuring and improving service quality, best-in-class agility for rapidly automating service requests, and an unrivaled customer service experience that makes it strikingly easy, fast, and affordable to use.

To learn more about Samanage solutions, please visit www.samanage.com or call 1-888-250-8971.

[1] https://www.shrm.org/Research/SurveyFindings/Articles/Documents/09-0228_Paid_Leave_SR_FNL.pdf

SOURCE Samanage

Related Links

http://www.samanage.com