Don't Let E-mail Zap Your Empolyees' Productivity

The typical at-desk employee in the workplace loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions, reports Basex, an IT research and consulting firm.

Those interruptions come from e-mail alerts, instant messages, cell phones and handheld devices that constantly buzz.

The typical employee also checks e-mail 50 times a day. Each time, the employee gets sidetracked, and their attention span suffers. Productivity drops. Thinking time decreases.

As a leader in the workplace, work with your employees to manage e-mails and to lessen daily interruptions. Try these techniques:

1. Turn off all visual and sound alerts that announce new e-mail.
2. Check e-mail at designated times during the day. Attempt to not check e-mail more often than every 45 minutes.
3. Whenever possible, communicate by phone or face-to-face. This can actually save time and helps to build relationships, which suffer when e-mail is a workplace's predominant mode of communication.
4. Resist using the reply-all function.
5. Don't send e-mails to simply say "Thanks."
6. Let co-workers know in advance that you reply to non-urgent messages within a day's time. Make responding to your external customers and clients your priority when responding.
7. When sending a message be concise and to the point from the very beginning. Preempt questions in your original e-mail.
8. Don't use the request delivery confirmation and read receipt options.
9. Use the cc: field sparingly.
10. Use the "out of office' feature to inform co-workers you are working on a project and are working on a deadline and will respond at a certain time.
11. Use the "high priority" option only when the topic is critical.
12. Use a meaningful subject line for your e-mail to make it easy for co-workers to find and reference the e-mail at a later date.
13. Don't use long sentences. Use bullet points and helpful formatting to make reading your e-mails easy to digest.
14. Experiment with internal "no e-mail Fridays." Companies, such as U.S. Cellular and Deloitte & Touche have successfully done this experiment.