Lotus Pulls The Rug From Under The IT Scare-Mongers

UK Workers NOT Overloaded by Technology Reveals MORI Survey

FICTION: "The majority of UK workers are stressed out because of technology and are on the brink of nervous breakdowns as a result of e-mail overload"

FACT: "Most people are comfortable with the number of e-mails they receive"

Lotus Development has commissioned a survey with leading research agency, MORI, to get to the bottom of the e-mail story and answer the question: Is the typical British worker really overloaded? The survey focused on mature e-mail users, those with over two years experience, from a broad cross section of the British working population. It revealed that e-mail volume is by no means as heavy as many scare-mongers lead people to believe. The majority of respondents, over sixty per-cent, receive no more than 10 e-mails a day and only one third felt that their current level of e-mail was too much to handle.

Other key findings of the survey included:

• Only 18% of e-mail users felt that their managers spend too much time at work on e-mail. Conversely only 20% of managers think their staff overuse e-mail.
• Respondents were surprisingly unconcerned about the future volume of e-mail with only 14% stating they would be unable to cope with the amount of e-mails that they are likely to receive in the next 12 months.
• Over 50% of the respondents claim that the main problem with e-mail is that it is not used properly.

This final statistic highlights the real issue with e-mail. Other MORI research found that fewer than one in five large companies provide e-mail guidelines or comprehensive e-mail training for their employees.

Jim Moffat, Communications Product Marketing Manager, comments: "There has been too much hype criticising technology and citing the e-mail as a major stress factor. I wanted to commission research to ascertain the situation in Britain. The results clearly show that UK workers are NOT drowning in e-mail. I'm sure that there are examples, most likely within the IT industry itself, of people feeling the e-mail strain but this is simply not the case in the majority of UK organisations. E-mail has been so beneficial to business that we should focus on using it more effectively. What is clear from this research is that companies should educate their employees about how to get the most out of e-mail."

Roger Dean, Executive Director of EEMA, adds: "Volume is not the issue with e-mail, the main problem is how it is used or more to the point, misused. Companies need to seriously consider issuing a policy document to their employees on e-mail use. This would not only improve employees time management but would also set guidelines to protect the company legally from e-mail abuse." EEMA, European Electronic Messaging Association, is an independent forum representing all participants in electronic messaging - from users, hardware and software vendors, and government bodies to public and private systems and service providers.

Technical details

MORI interviewed a nationally representative quota sample of 772 British workers using E-mail at work, focusing on 333 "mature" users, those with more than two years' experience of e-mail. Interviews were carried out face-to-face, in-home. Data were weighted to match known population profile.