2009 16 Dec

Email Management Helps Tame Email Overload.

You are in good company if, like other companies with no email management plan, your employees are grumbling they are being overwhelmed by email. The convenience of email is quickly being lost in the time spent reading, responding to and managing it.

There are 3 significant reasons to get your company’s email excess under control. Let’s look at how compliance, employee competence and electronic discovery are compromised by an disorderly email management system.

Compromised Compliance

If your workers regularly receive email with legal files attached having a structured electronic content management (ECM) system is crucial. This would make certain that your emails connected to documenting commitments and responsibilities are recorded, complete and easily retrievable.

Ask yourself such questions: “Do my workers always document receipt of business-crucial documents by email?” and “What kind of legal files is received that isn’t being stored in a manner that allows access by others?”

Compromised Workers Efficiency

Recent studies show that workers at major companies are spending at least one hour, and many of them up to 3 hours, every day reading, replying to and trying to manually organize email. Overflowing in-boxes keep employees chained to their email in-box and away from their primary job duties.

Capturing, sorting, storing and retrieving email letters and attachments manually and not having an electronic record retention and email destruction schedule are some of the ways efficiency is compromised.

To obtain a picture of what email handling is costing you in terms of employee efficiency, multiply your overall number of employees who receive email by one hour. That’s the smallest number of man hours per day you’re probably losing to incompetent email management.

Compromised Electronic Discovery

Electronic legal detection is often essential when litigation is filed by or against your company. It’s the process of retrieving and investigating electronic records for data relevant to legal action or compliance evaluations.

Being able to obtain electronic documents and messages rapidly is very important to a strong legal defense or compliance plan, and mandated by law. Surprisingly, many companies still do not have an official system for archiving employee email in a method that makes that retrieval straightforward.

Even worse, a lot of companies have no written policies about when a worker’s email can be deleted. You may end up forced to explain that crucial messages were deleted by employees because no email retention policy was in place.

An Affordable Solution

You can in fact realize significant savings through increased employee competence brought about by automated management and fast retrieval of files and emails. Having the capacity to access this information off-site via a secure web-based file management repository further develops efficiency and minimizes costs for document management system.

A well planned document management system improves security, increases worker efficiency and allows timely compliance with regulations and electronic discovery requests. If your employees are buried by email excess, it’s time to introduce centralized email management as part of a document management system at your firm. The competences you’ll realize will make you wondering why you waited so long.