While there is a significant time variation between workers in the southern Mediterranean countries and the northern Benelux countries, the typical European employee who uses a computer at work spends 18.4 minutes per day sending and receiving emails.
According to research by the Riga-based software business DeskTime, employees in Luxembourg spend only a little bit more than 2 minutes per day communicating by email, compared to 55 minutes on the Mediterranean island of Malta.
These numbers show that Croatian employees correspond via official business email for roughly 14 minutes every day. Thus, Croatia is in the center, ranking 15th out of the 30 nations in the study, which was carried out in November and comprised more than 11,000 employees from throughout Europe.
The advent of new communication technologies, which became extremely popular in northern nations during the coronavirus epidemic, helps to explain why there are such stark contrasts between the north and south of Europe.
Companies in the Benelux nations—Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—as well as Austria, Switzerland, and Germany—started using Teams, Zoom, Slack, and PhpStorm significantly during the pandemic to communicate with one another and with other businesses, which led to a decrease in traditional email correspondence.
On the other hand, these new tools were not immediately adopted by the nations of the southern Mediterranean. Due to this, they continue to use e-mail frequently, as well as Skype, MS Outlook, and Google Docs, which are more traditional forms of communication. MS Outlook is a popular alternative to e-mail in Croatia, and the fact that it ranks in the middle suggests that it also makes use of these modern features.
Companies all across the world now allow hybrid part-time work from home arrangements or telecommuting. According to DeskTime CEO Artis Rozentals, they simultaneously incorporated a variety of tools and applications into their daily routine. He continues, “Email used to be their primary method of internal and external communication, but now they employ more effective tools since they save time.
The authors of the study claim that since the coronavirus pandemic breakout, meetings and video conferences have been held utilizing apps like Teams and Slack, resulting in speedier communication and a decrease in the use of e-mail.
DeskTime, a company that monitors productivity in businesses and was established in the Latvian capital in 2011, uses a variety of tools, including Teams from the American developer Microsoft, to facilitate communication.
As a result, Rozentals claims that he no longer opens email throughout the workday.
Yet the average employee in Latvia uses 36 minutes each email exchange. This places Greece and Spain in second and third place in Europe, exactly behind Malta, where workers spend between 36 and 38 minutes at the office.
At the bottom of the list, with Luxembourg, are workers in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, who send and receive emails in intervals of 3.67 to 6.11 minutes.
Employees that spend the majority of their workdays on computers participated in the study.
The report also reveals that employees in Europe send emails 33% less frequently than those in the US. An employee from Europe spends 18.42 minutes a day on email, compared to an American’s 27.23 minutes.
According to Rosenthals, this may be a sign of differences in the two regions’ cultures, habits, and methods of workplace communication.
But even in the USA, employees have been using Teams and Slack more, which has resulted in less use of email, since the coronavirus pandemic outbreak in early 2020.
In 2019, the software giant Adobe claimed that American workers communicated via email for more than 300 minutes (five hours) every day on average. According to DeskTime’s research, they spent slightly more than 27 minutes in November 2022.
Microsoft introduced the Teams app to the market in 2017, and at the time, 2 million users were using it. Microsoft estimates that there will be 270 million users in 2022.