Nearly 55 percent of the milleannials in India feel that their time spent on work email has shot up by two hours since they started working from home. The revelation came out in a survey conducted by Hiver, a Gmail-based customer service solution for teams. The survey was conducted to understand the change in email usage behaviour while working remotely during the pandemic.

Unlike ever before, a large number of employees have been working from home since the last eight to 10 months. This is a global trend and India is no exception. Such change in work culture has induced a necessary change in their email usage patterns too where most of the company, client and colleague communication now happen over email. This includes long and short communications.

The survey reports that nearly 60 percent of millennials believe that long email interactions hamper productivity while working from home. Another interesting insight of the survey is that nearly 57 percent of millennials feel the need to constantly check their work email every few hours since working remotely.

More than half (52 percent) of the millennials surveyed said they now check their email as soon it lands in their inbox, which is up by 10% from before WFH began. The survey also found that over 56% of millennials continuously aim to hit ‘Inbox Zero’ – which is a rigorous approach to email management aimed at keeping the inbox empty, or almost empty, at all times.
However, despite email growing as a communication channel between the stakeholders, only eight percent of the participants preferred it over a mix of chat platforms and video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google e-meet, MS Teams, Slack, and others (67 percent).

Niraj Ranjan Rout, CEO, and Co-founder of Hiver said, “As the threat of the pandemic continues, work from home has become a norm. Even as organizations have adopted virtual collaboration tools to make teamwork effective, email continues to drive maximum connections within organizations and externally as well. With automation and integration of advanced technology, Hiver is working towards redefining email management and helping teams stay productive.”