Emails 'cost businesses an hour a day'

Spam e-mails and personal messages between staff cost small British businesses up to an hour of working time a day, new research showed today.

Analysts claim precious minutes are wasted by almost all office workers as they clear their inboxes of a daily deluge of unwanted or unnecessary mail.

A survey of companies, carried out by the University of Nottingham’s Institute for Enterprise and Innovation, discovered that a third of respondents believe that 60 minutes per day is frittered away on the activity.

Almost a fifth of the 174 businesses contacted claimed that they lost more than an hour as staff assessed and deleted correspondence.

One respondent said: “E-mail has become the bane of all of our business lives. It is the memo of this century that everyone hides behind, I truly hate it.”

The study, part of the UK Business Barometer – a project to provide better information about small companies in Britain – was the result of complaints about the volume of commercial e-mail.

“We undertook the survey following reports that some large companies and organisations have introduced measures to reduce the volumes of e-mails sent and received by staff,” said an institute spokeswoman.

“New European laws also came into force in early December, the first step towards banning the sending of spam.”

Research staff also found that small companies snub video or call conferencing technology in favour of face-to-face discussions.

Almost half of those questioned said “remote” meetings were less efficient than traditional discussions.