Average employee spends nearly 11 hours a week drafting emails

The average employee spends 10 hours and 47 minutes a week drafting emails that few recipients read, according to new research.

The survey of 8,000 small business employees (split evenly between Americans and Brits) asked respondents how much time they spend on emails: they draft an average of 112 emails a week, spending just over five and a half minutes on each.

But small business employees surveyed believe their emails are only fully read and understood by their recipients a third (36%) of the time.

This might explain why respondents said that when their email is responded to, it’s common to have their questions not be answered (62%), to be addressed by the wrong name (51%) or to be asked a question they just answered (49%).

Respondents are aware they’re guilty of not reading emails, too: over half (57%) admitted that if an email is “too long” — eight or more sentences — they won’t bother reading the whole thing.

With that, small business employees delete, or otherwise don’t read, an email based solely on the subject line an average of eight times per day.

This is detrimental for employees: 45% have missed something (like a deadline, a meeting, etc.) because they didn’t read an important email.

Commissioned by Slack and conducted by OnePoll, the survey delved further into email and explored what alternatives small business employees would like to see for workplace communication.

Almost half (46%) of respondents said that email is an “outdated form of communication.”

Some of their frustration comes from losing emails to the spam or junk folders (53%), or their inbox being clogged with emails that aren’t relevant to them (50%) — others said it’s easy to misconstrue tone over email (47%) and there’s an expectation of staying “formal” (45%).

When it comes to staying “formal,” younger generations were more likely to see that as an expectation and find it a challenge. Results found 57% of Gen Zers and 46% of millennials agreed, while only 37% of Gen X and 34% of baby boomers said the same.

There was also a direct correlation between age and feeling like emails are a waste of time. Younger respondents were more likely to say emails are not worth it (41% of Gen Z and 38% of millennials) compared to older generations (30% of Gen X and 22% of baby boomers).