Email Management Helps Tame Email Overload

You’re in good company if, like other firms with no email management strategy, your employees are complaining they’re being overwhelmed by email. The convenience of email is quickly being lost in the time spent reading, responding to and managing it.

There are three important reasons to get your company’s email overload under control. Let’s examine how compliance, employee efficiency and electronic discovery are compromised by an unruly email management system. 

Compromised Compliance

If your employees regularly receive email with legal documents attached having a structured electronic content management (ECM) system is crucial. This would ensure that your emails related to documenting commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and easily retrievable.

Ask yourself these questions: “Do my employees always document receipt of business-critical documents by email?” and “What kind of legal documentation is received that isn’t being stored in a way that allows access by others?”

If you’re unsure of the answers to those questions, your company’s compliance with contractual and regulatory requirements could be at risk. Contracts received but not documented, changes made to legal documents but not tracked or saved in a centralized document management system are just two of the problems that arise when email remains unmanaged.

Compromised Employee Efficiency

Recent studies show that workers at major companies are spending at least one hour, and many of them up to three hours, every day reading, responding to and trying to manually manage email. Overflowing in-boxes keep employees chained to their in-box and away from their primary job duties.

Capturing, sorting, storing and retrieving email messages and attachments manually and not having  an automated record retention and email destruction schedule are some of the ways efficiency is compromised .

To get a picture of what email handling is costing you in terms of employee efficiency, multiply your total number of employees who receive email by one hour. That’s the minimum number of man hours per day you’re probably losing to inefficient email management.

Compromised Electronic Discovery

Electronic legal discovery is often necessary when litigation is filed by or against your company. It’s the process of retrieving and examining electronic records for information relevant to legal action or compliance reviews.

Being able to retrieve electronic documents and messages quickly is vital to a strong legal defense or compliance strategy, and mandated by law. Surprisingly, many companies still do not have a formal system for archiving employee email in a way that makes that retrieval straightforward.

Even worse, many companies have no written policies about when employee email can be deleted. You may find yourself forced to explain that critical messages were deleted by employees because no email retention policy was in place.

Additional Security

Security is always enhanced when email automation is implemented. Automated encryption and other critical security measures are built into the data capture and storage process. Centralized email storage, as opposed to local machine storage, reduces the possibility of a security breach. Automating the retention and destruction schedules for email throughout your organization removes the human factor and insures uniform compliance with your firm’s email policies.

An Affordable Solution

One or more of these roadblocks to efficient operation may already be affecting your company if it has no formal email management system in place. You may, however, have delayed implementing electronic content management due to concerns about cost, digital storage space and IT staffing requirements.

Fortunately, today’s sophisticated email management systems are within reach of most organizations. Because this type of system can be part of a full-featured document management system, it requires no additional IT staffing or hardware outlay. It is also easy to use and economical to implement.

You can actually realize significant savings through increased employee efficiency brought about by automated management and fast retrieval of documents and emails.  Having the ability to access this information off-site via a secure web–based document management repository further improves efficiency and minimizes costs.

A well-designed ECM system enhances security, increases employee efficiency and allows timely compliance with regulations and electronic discovery requests. If your employees are buried by email overload, it’s time to introduce centralized email management as part of a document management strategy at your firm. The efficiencies you’ll realize will have you wondering why you waited so long.