A study has found that as many as forty-percent of all workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany spend at least an hour a day on personal email, while at work. And most of the rest spend at least half an hour a day.
In other words, nearly all workers spend at least a half an hour a day attending to personal email, while on company time, and some spend much more.
Now mind you, we first wrote this – and the study first came out – in 2005; here in 2019 we can only imagine that it’s an even greater amount of time, and greater number of employees. We know for sure that workers spend a lot of time on email (both work and personal) and a lot of work time on non-work related personal matters.
In fact, Huffington Post reports that U.S. employees spend an astonishing 6.3 hours a day on email, with about half of that devoted to work email, and the rest to personal email!
Of course it’s not just email. According to HRDive , employees spend at least 4 hours a week on websites that are not related to their work.
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(Relatedly, a study has found that children use electronics for as much as an astonishing 50 hours a week!)
According to Clearswift, a British security firm, with offices in California as well, only ten percent of workers claimed to never deal with personal email at work.
Explained Clearswift CEO Dave Guyatt, “In a typical 100-person company in each of the three countries [the U.S., the UK, and Germany], for example, the survey shows that almost 1,700 working days each year are lost because people are using corporate e-mail systems for non-company purposes.”
1,700 working days being spent on employees’ personal email.
And that’s in a company of just 100 people!
Sweet Thor’s beard!
As Guyatt points out, “That’s equivalent to about seven new full-time staff.”
Of course, it would be interesting to see how much time the average employee spends, while at home, working on work email, because of course the boundary between work and home are growing ever smaller and fuzzier. According to the HuffPost article, “More than 90 percent of the workers admitted they checked personal emails at work and 87 percent looked at business emails outside of working hours.”
Those numbers are rather staggering.
That said, what goes on at your place of work, and in your own work life, in terms of personal email?
If you are an employee, please let us know your own personal email practices during work time.
If you are an employer, we’d love to hear what your policy on employees reading and sending personal time while on the clock.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.