There are irritating one to everyone emails – and then there are mind numbingly wasteful  one to 840,000 emails. As you may have read, an email generated within the NHS was recently was sent to 840,000 people – by mistake.

If each person took just  10 seconds to delete that email – a “back of a fag packet” calculation says that would take 292 working days out of the NHS!

But this is not counting:
– all the reply to all’s (another 292 days – a conservative estimate)
– all the time wasted gossiping about the mishap (an additional 1000 days)
– the resultant  slowing down of the system due to volume (an additional 2000 days)

So that one email has taken an estimated 3,584 days out of the organisation – which equates to 14 years of time. The equivalent of one worker off sick for 14 years.

The point here is not what happened at the NHS – the point is that this is happening every day in almost every company. Granted it doesn’t show up quite as badly as this unfortunate major mishap.

However consider that a single email sent to 60 people can easily take 4 working days out of an organisation. Mulitply that by 10 and you’ve just lost 40 staff!

And we just put up with it. Why??

If a computer is not functioning we get someone to fix it. If a photocopier is not working an engineer comes out. If someone is not using their spreadsheet correctly we train them – but with email we just think that is how it is and realistically nothing can be done.

Day in and day out – month on month – year after year.

It does not have to be this way!

Now I invite you to read the comment below – it was made about the NHS email blunder by an NHS employee who has previously attended an Emailogic training session:

“I can confidently say that I haven’t made an email cock up since I went on an @Emailogic course nearly a decade ago. Best course ever."

Says it all really!