A new survey, the 2003 E-Mail Rules, Policies and Practices Survey from the American Management Association, Clearswift and The ePolicy Institute, reckons that 22% of employers have fired employees for violating email policy. That seems kinda harsh. What are people doing with their email? Here are some stats:
– 52% of U.S. companies monitor incoming and outgoing e-mail
– Only 19% of employers monitor internal e-mail communications among employees
– 40% of employers use software to control employees’ written e-mail content
– 14% of organizations have had employee e-mail subpoenaed by a court or regulatory body. That’s an increase of 5% over 2001, when 9% of respondents reported employee e-mail had been subpoenaed.
– 1 in 20 organizations has battled a lawsuit triggered by employee e-mail
– 76% of e-mail users have lost time in the last year due to e-mail system problems
– 35% estimate they lost only half a day, but 24% think they have lost more than two days
– The average e-mail user spends about 25% of the workday on e-mail
– 8% of e-mail users spend more than four hours (half the work day) on e-mail
– 92% of respondents receive spam mail at work
– 47% say spam constitutes more than 10% of all their e-mail
– 7% report spam represents over 50% of all e-mail received
– 75% of respondents said they were fed up with receiving surveys like this via e-mail (I made that up, but they don’t make clear how they did this survey, which involved 1,100 U.S. employers, or whether some of the surveys got mistagged as spam and trashed.)