It is time to ask an important question in business: How much is email really helping? The short answer is that it isn't, and companies are hurting themselves by continuing to use it.
While other text-based communications have popped up over the years, email still reigns supreme in the workplace. Yet for all of the connections it has facilitated, it has also caused countless headaches and data breaches. So why is everyone still using it? Email not only lacks strong encryption methods, but according to Scope contributor Emma Seppala, email as a channel can be an overwhelming source of stress.
"[J]ust sitting down at our desk to check our email with a cup of coffee can bring on a deluge of emotional assailants," Seppala wrote. "Between 30-300 different emotional stimuli are delivered to you within the span of minutes. From an email from your boss asking you to complete a task urgently, to a passive-aggressive message from a family-member, to news from a colleague that he's out sick and you have to take over his workload. One hour of email can take you through a huge range of emotions and stressors."
While it's true that we can't run away from our problems (especially at work), employees need the ability to manage potential stress triggers. The problem with email is that it generally aggregates a great deal of different communications, meaning that important documents can get lost in a shuffle of spam or messages with no actual bearing on the day. Personal emails are often included in this mix, opening up the potential for private anxieties to ride their way into the workplace. Top it off with a healthy dose of phishing scams and potential malware infections, and email suddenly doesn't look all that useful or effective.
Email-related stress prevalent, helps no one
One might be hard-pressed to find a professional who will completely sing the praises of email. Businesswoman Claire Burge realized a few years ago that her reliance on email was beginning to become a hindrance. Upon taking an inventory of the messages she received, she found that 80 percent of the emails in her inbox were more appropriately handled on a different channel. After several years entirely without email, she has found herself more able to keep her sanity in check. By her calculations, her productivity has also increased by 45 percent.
"The unwritten rule of email is that you have to try and empty it out," she told Irish Examiner contributor Kelly O'Brien. "But if you get away from this and into a task-based environment, work becomes a lot more productive."
One such task is the sending and receiving of important documents. Thanks to cloud-based faxing, critical files can still get where they need to go without complicating an inbox.
Cloud-based fax an effective solution
The easy answer to certain email stresses and inefficiencies is to eradicate email completely from business settings, but this cannot be accomplished in regulation alone. Email, for as awful as it can sometimes be, is still convenient. Messages can be sent and received from any number of endpoints – including smartphones. It is safe to say that some people are willing to trade sanity for convenience – even if they shouldn't. According to Seppala, this can have a negative impact on attitudes toward other employees and the overall quality of work.
"We know that when our stress response is activated, the parts of our brain that respond with fear of anxiety tend to take over, weakening our ability to make rational choices and to reason logically," Seppala wrote. "You may be stressed; what's more, your own ability to respond appropriately is impacted. We know that our emotions impact the way we act. You're going to reply with a different tone if you're upset (even at someone other than your email recipient) than if you're not."
Moving away from this channel is going to require a new solution that mimics the convenience of email while improving on security and reducing potential stress. One possible method of managing employee email stress and elimination is the increased use of faxing. This basically allows for important documents to be sent and received in a more organized manner, not to mention one free of the clutter associated with email. But faxing, for as secure and effective as it is, has historically suffered from the aging hardware associated with it. In response to this, businesses should investigate the possibilities of cloud-based fax. By converting fax to a software-defined asset, it is possible to access the channel's powers from anywhere with an Internet connection.
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