E-mail VS Instant Messaging. How Much People Use Them?

We have just published the results of a survey that we funded internally to find out how people use e-mail and instant messaging. The survey was conducted with 340 individuals in mid-October. Here's a summary of what we found:

* Users in smaller organizations (up to 1,000 employees) spend a median of 33% of their workday doing something in their e-mail client, including checking or sending e-mail, arranging their schedule, managing tasks, etc. Users in larger organizations spend a median of 40% of their day doing work in e-mail. This means that in a 40-hour workweek, users spend between 2 hours / 38 minutes and 3 hours / 12 minutes doing work in e-mail.

* Instant messaging, on the other hand, is used far less than e-mail – for 2% of the average e-mail user’s day in smaller organizations, and 3% for those in larger organizations.

* E-mail is a very important repository of business information. In smaller organizations, 44% of the information that individuals need to do their job is accessible or in their e-mail client; for users in larger organizations, the figure is 48%.

* Just how desirable is video in the context of conveying information? It depends on the content. For example, we asked about the preference for viewing an online video or reading text to convey a short news story while at work: the preference for text ranged from 72% to 75% vs. only 16% to 22% for video (7% to 9% were not sure or had no preference). However, for a 30-minute training session, the preference for viewing a video ranged from 56% to 73%, with 21% to 28% preferring a text-based format for conveying this information.

Source: Unified Communications Alert By Michael Osterman, Network World, 10/30/2008