We'll show you how an organisation with 50,000 people can save almost $200,000,000 a year just by replacing one email a day with a Microsoft Teams or Yammer post.

Even an organisation with 1,000 people can save more than $3.8 million a year by making some simple changes.

Modern digital collaboration platforms help people collaborate effectively, but email refuses to die and still dominates.

Many people have effectively demonstrated just how inefficient email is. To highlight one of these, check out this short video which is both funny and alarmingly true. But the conclusion is irrefutable: email is inefficient and we need to use it less for internal collaboration.

Not only is email inefficient, it is also more time-consuming to read/write emails compared with read/write messages on collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and Yammer. The savings will blow you away.

At SWOOP Analytics we’re actively playing a role in helping people and organisations get a better balance in using email versus Microsoft Teams Channels and Yammer. Microsoft Teams Channels are dedicated areas for a team of people to discuss things, make decisions etc. Yammer is Microsoft’s enterprise social networking platform, to bring larger communities of people together.

By making it very clear how you balance your use of email vs Teams Channels and Yammer, SWOOP’s newest product - SWOOP Analytics for M365 - nudges you to consider if you need to change. We call this the Email Liberated habit.

We have done large-scale benchmarking and found it is entirely possible to get a balance of 5 emails for every 1 Teams Channel or Yammer message. When you get to this ratio, or better, you get a score of 80 or above for Email Liberated in SWOOP for M365’s dashboard, which shows you your personal online habits:

Let’s look at the numbers to find out how much you can save by becoming Email Liberated.

Our global benchmarking analysis of email volume has found people read, on average, 28.2 emails per day and write 5.5 emails per day. Microsoft’s workplace analytics platform Viva Insights works with the following estimates for time spent reading and writing emails: 

• Reading 1 email = 3 minutes

• Writing 1 email = 5 minutes

For the benchmarking data this is equivalent of spending 84.5 minutes reading and 27.5 minutes writing emails, or a total of 112 minutes per day. 

Reading and writing messages in a Microsoft Teams Channel, or on Yammer, is estimated to take only 4 minutes. Messages are typically much more concise, and often part of a thread of conversation, which accounts for the difference.

To become Email Liberated, you need only to replace one of the 5 daily emails (20%) with a message posted to a Teams Channels or Yammer. That means 20% of the email time, 22.5 minutes, can be cut in half. You’ll be saving 11.25 minutes per day.

Saving 11.25 minutes per day may not sound like a lot in an eight hour working day, but when you add it all up we’re talking big numbers. Using an average hourly wage of $80 as the basis we arrive at the following:

• 1,000 people = $3,841,372 per year saved

• 5,000 people = $19,206,862 per year saved

• 20,000 people = $76,827,451 per year saved

• 50,000 people = $192,068,629 per year saved

These numbers only include the time saved using a different platform. It doesn’t include the massive uplift in efficiency from having everything in one place, and avoiding the unbearable email trails, cc’ing, bcc’ing, reply all, that is an inevitable consequence of “collaborating” in email.

Email Liberated is one of seven habits in SWOOP Analytics for M365. The other six habits are Chat Liberated, Asynchronous Collaborator, File Sharer, Camera Confident, Screen Sharer and Community Contributor.

Why not get a demo today? It’ll pay for itself in minutes.

(Hat-tip to our friend from a big global corporate for the inspiration to write this blogpost. We’ve promised anonymity, but to the ‘nerd from Atlanta’ you know it is you we are talking about.)