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May 15th, 2008

The cost of inefficient e-mail

You might have already been concerned about the amount of time you and your employees spend managing e-mail (read, write, find).  Have you stopped to consider the impact to the bottom line?  Based on our data and calculations, a 500-person organization spends more than $4 million dollars each year on inefficient e-mail. 

The average worker receives at least 65 e-mail messages per day.  Multiply that by the number of work days in the year (240) and that means that the average worker receives 15,600 e-mails per year. 

It takes, on average, two and a half minutes to read and respond to an e-mail message.  That means that each worker spends 39,000 minutes/650 hours/81 days per year managing e-mail.

Of the 156,000 e-mails that the average worker receives each year, about thirty percent are unnecessary.  That is equal to 27 wasted days each year.

Based on a salary of $40/hour,  27 wasted days costs about $8,640 per year.  If there are 500 employees in your organization, the total cost of inefficient e-mail is $4,320,000. 

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