Would you know if one of your employees was drowning in emails?

Would you know if a member of your team was unnecessarily spending their personal time at weekends checking their email account and responding to emails?

Research carried out by the CIPD found that two thirds of workers check their emails outside of working hours and a third said they felt work always looming over them, unable to mentally switch off. Such pressures can increase the risk of emotional exhaustion and data recorded by the European Working Conditions Survey found that people working outside regular hours report higher instances of cardiovascular problems and musculoskeletal pain.

The Right To Disconnect

With research increasingly revealing the negative effect that this out of hours working activity, European governments and businesses are starting to take action. In 2017 France introduced a law that gave employees of companies with more than 50 members of staff the right to negotiate the responsibility of monitoring emails out of work. The “right to disconnect” is now a recognised part of French law.

German vehicle manufacturer Volkswagen was one of the earliest adopters of a ban of all out of hours email monitoring, adjusting their servers to ensure that employees could not access email accounts when not at work. Car manufacturer Daimler introduced a similar scheme that removed employee access to email during holidays.

Monitor employee email workload while respecting staff privacy

Our Outlook Tracker software was designed to provide organisations with straightforward real time data that will help you to make better decisions about staff workload and monitor SLAs or KPIs. Ultimately it will help you to increase productivity across your business and make significant cost savings. It can help you to ensure that employees are able to manage their email load without causing them undue anxiety, or distracting them from other tasks. Crucially, in the context of this article, it can also reveal who is spending time responding to emails out of hours when this should not be a part of their role.

Measure root cause and response times

The software is completely unique, is only £200 or less per license and is incredibly easy to set up. It measures the root cause and response times for each email using category or reason criteria, tracking emails by subject”, 'sent to', 'replied to', 'date' and 'time'. It is completely secure and does not record the content of the email. It measures in real time, giving you an instant view of how email is being used in your business.

Client Feedback

Our clients report being able to use this data in all sorts of ways, including, amongst other things:

• Monitoring service level agreements
• Gaining insight into why customers make contact and how quickly their enquiries are being dealt with
• Ensuring that no one employee is struggling and under pressure unnecessarily
• Revealing which root causes are leading to unnecessary time expenditure
• Measuring staff KPIs

Using this information, managers and team leaders are able to implement changes and reorganise workloads to ensure that people have time to deal effectively with emails, meet SLA’s and KPI’s without becoming drowned in a back log.

Gary Cane, Managing Director of Premier Block Management, London, commented

"As a customer-focused company, it's vital that we reply to customers quickly and understand why they are contacting us.  With Outlook Email Tracker we gain an insight into the reasons why customers are engaging with us and we can use the speed of email response as a KPI for performance review."

With many customers using Outlook Tracker all over the globe, giving great feedback, we’re delighted to be helping so many organisations.
If you would like to be able to keep an eye on the cause and effect of what is probably your company’s biggest time expenditure, then please contact us today.