Most employees tend to ignore 40 per cent of emails daily

An average employee receives close to 180 emails every day and does not bother to open 40 per cent of those and even if he or she manages to open some, the reply rate is just 16 per cent, a new report revealed on Wednesday.

The email behaviour at the workplace highlights that a widespread misuse of email has led to unwanted inbox clutter, according to the email collaboration solution provider Hiver.

"Email clearly remains an essential and popular way of communicating, but there are a number of findings from the Hiver State of Email report that indicates that it is broken and requires a significant rehaul," said Niraj Rout, co-founder and CEO of Hiver.

For the report, the data was collated from almost 1,000 email accounts of employees from across companies.

The biggest contributor to the inbox clutter was group emails sent to shared inboxes or distribution lists (such as info@company.com.

The report stated that 51 per cent of people received only group emails.

The report also throws light on irresponsible "Cc'ing" habit which has become a standard in virtually every email, for reasons ranging from keeping people updated on specific projects to account for their work with their managers.

Another major contributor to the inbox clutter situation was the unnecessary and excessive forwarding of emails.

Thirteen per cent of the total emails that employees receive were forwarded to them.

Of the emails forwarded to people, employees open 70 per cent of them but reply to only 20 per cent and of the group emails. employees open 57 per cent of them, but reply to only 14 per cent.

"The low response and read rates for Cc and forwarded emails demonstrate that while people want to use email as a collaboration tool, it was clearly not designed for it," Rout said.