With a head office in London and regional offices throughout the country, charity Friends of the Earth had a chronic e-mail problem. Training support officer Claudia Rawlinson says, “It was just overwhelming. People were not using it effectively. Because internal e-mail was so often full of things that were unnecessary, important messages were being overlooked.”
Training addressed a raft of good practice do’s and don’ts, including the use of multiple aliases. Prior to training, a staff survey typically characterised reaction to e-mail as “drowning” and “frustrating”. After the seminar, phrases used included “feeling in control”, “invaluable” and “improving”.
The quantified results of training were:
• 23 minutes per employee a day were saved, on average
• Irrelevant traffic dropped by 39 per cent
• People accessed their e-mails 41 per cent less
• 25 per cent less e-mails were received
• E-mails in inboxes decreased by 71 per cent
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