Email has suffered name-calling (productivity-killer, cockroach of the Internet) and even in the case of Atos, banishment. 

But when business language consultancy, The Writer, asked workers* what problem they had with email, the majority (65 percent) had none.“Email gets a bad press but people like it,” says Neil Taylor, managing partner of The Writer. “We do get more of them than ever. And that was the biggest problem people had with it. Email has replaced not just replaced letters, faxes but phone calls and meetings too.”

Managing email accounts for 28 percent of an average workweek according to the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). If the average full time wage in the UK is  £27,000 a year**, the cost to business of reading and answering email is £7,650 per worker per year.“With so much time spent using email, it’s bonkers there isn’t a proliferation of email writing courses up and down the country. If you get your people writing emails better, shorter with more impact it will save time and money,” says Neil.“Time and financial savings are waiting to be unleashed; hiding in the wording of billions of emails that get sent every day.”

The research was conducted online by independent research company ICM in August 2014. They interviewed a random sample of 2,000 adults aged 18+. Surveys were conducted across the country and the results have been weighted to the profile of GB adults.

This was among ‘interaction workers’ defined as high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals

Office of National Statistics, 2014