Our reliance on email has gotten out of hand, and there’s absolutely no reason for it; email is no longer the most effective way to communicate, engage, or collaborate with your workforce.

According to various internet sources (just google it!), the average modern-day worker spends anywhere from 25% to 50% of their working week reading and answering emails. If we take the 2018 median hourly earnings for full-time employees (£14.31 per hour), that, after holidays and bank holidays, equates to an average annual cost of £9,873 per employee.

Now multiply that by the number of people working for you who use email as part of their role—whatever the number, I can guarantee you would be better off spending some of it on Metro and saving the rest.

Let’s look at two everyday examples of why companies waste so much time and money on email.

Finding ‘the one’ – We’ve all been there. You need to get in touch with someone who knows how to do something or has something you desperately need, but you don’t know who they are. So, what do you do?

Well, the usual approach is to start by sending an email to someone you do know, asking if they happen to know anyone who can help. In turn, they reply that they have forwarded your email to a couple of people who might, who in turn forward it to someone else because they can’t, and before you know it, your email has turned into many, many, many emails, with many, many, many people copied in for good measure before eventually (usually after you’ve worked things out for yourself) this elusive person is found.

Not only does this approach take time, but it also involves troubling many other employees who are busy forwarding other people’s requests around the business, let alone trying to do their jobs—email breeds email.

What’s the alternative? Metro Unified Comms takes away much of this guesswork – for a start, it provides a comprehensive directory that includes contact pictures, role and contact details and highlights areas of expertise and things they are interested in.

This information means you no longer must email everyone for anything—you simply search for the person based on what you need and contact them directly. Believe me—your workmates will applaud you for it, and you’ll get things done in a jiffy.

Asking questions – People learn by asking questions. New team members learn by asking questions. Your workforce learns by asking questions. Asking questions is something that was instilled in us from childhood.

If you want to know something, ask for feedback, ideas, or pretty much anything, then by far, the most common approach today is to email someone (or worse, a group of people) asking for their help. This commonly comes in the form of a question, and chances are many people within the same organisation have either a) asked the same question or b) had the same question.

What typically happens next is that the person asking the question receives numerous differing responses back from many different people, which hopefully provides the information they were looking for—if not, they keep on emailing. Nevertheless, once we get all the information we need, the email either gets forgotten or is archived somewhere on your email server for eternity.

Email is the business equivalent of a Black Hole.

What’s the alternative? Metro Unified Comms provides team members with personalised homepages that deliver a unique view of everything they need to know, do, or ask, including social communications, instant messaging, feedback, performance stats, and much more. It also includes a survey tool that can set up targeted and ongoing surveys for location/stores or individual completion.

The inclusion of ‘FAQ’s and ‘Ask the Expert’ links within each task have a significant effect on both productivity and compliance – for one, the person creating the task is made to consider what questions recipients are most likely to ask. Additionally, contained within the FAQ tab is the facility to nominate a ‘Q&A Expert’, so in the unlikely event any further questions need to be asked, these are automatically sent directly to the most relevant team member likely to know the answer – these missing/additional FAQ’s are then added to the task to help those yet to complete it.

Utilising the FAQ tab has been proven to significantly improve compliance and the likelihood of a task being completed without delay.

I suspect we could go on all day looking at other scenarios where email is not the best solution – these things can range from sending tasks, coordinating activities, scheduling events, and collating information to pretty much anything else you currently use email for – Email breeds email.

To find out why almost 120 leading brands and retailers trust RMS with their communications, compliance, team engagement, and much more, contact us to book your personalised demonstration of how Metro can work for your business.