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Training to reduce email overload: does it pays off?

Email overload remains one of the top ten drains on our productivity and well-being.  Can email management training help reduce email overload and improve our well-being and mental health? We often assume that email management and best practice is instinctive.  So do we really need training to reduce email overload?  After all most of us use email socially so why bother to offer training at work?

A recent survey from the Association of Talent Development found that organisations who have comprehensive training programes:

• Enjoy a 281% higher income per employee than those without a formal training.;
• Have a higher rate of employee retention and engagement.

Interestingly Millennials value training more than Generation X.

Many of you will have formal training programmes in place but how many of them include email management training specifically to reduce email overload?  More often than not any email training consists primarily of software (eg Outlook) training.  Yes, using the software properly is important.  However to reduce email overload you need to look outside the email technology and instead at the email culture, the quality of employees’s email communications and the techniques they use to manage their time dealing with email and their sender’s response expectations. After attending one of Mesmo Consultancy’s Smart Email Management workshops delegates find:

• They save between 15 and 45 minutes a day dealing with email.
• Control of their inbox is improved.
• The expectation of an instant reply is better managed.
• Email overload stress levels too are down.

Why because they no longer feel driven by their inbox, instead they have taken back control of their inbox and day.  They decide when to check for new email.  Good email etiquette often helps reduce the rounds of email ping-pong and means they send the right message, right first time, thus reducing the risk of an email war breaking out.

Email dominates business life.  How much time are you and your colleagues wasting through lack of proper training?  Click here to check? Maybe you have had some training but chances are you are only using a small percentage of the techniques covered on the course.

We all need to justify our training budgets.  An average Smart Email Management workshop costs £45 per person.  If you are wasting one hour a day and can reclaim even half that then training to reduce email overload pays for itself within the first day (assuming even the median hourly pay of £14.31).

Why waste any more time?  If you are serious about well-being, improving mental health and productivity, grab a chunk of that training budget now for some Smart Email Management Training.

If you need some help justifying the budget call us and we can talk through how to convince the Board that providing email best practice training will improve business productivity.

Tags: email management training, email overload, Email overload and mental health, Email overload stress, Value of email management training

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