By A new survey by Intermedia, the world’s largest Microsoft hosted Exchange provider, reveals the top business communications New Year’s resolutions for 2011. The survey — conducted by Harris Research on behalf of Intermedia — found that three in five respondents(1) resolve to be more organized and productive. Only one in five resolves to unplug from email in their time off from work. The findings lead to the notion that American workers are focused on getting more done in 2011.
Best comptia A+ Training, Comptia A+ Certification at Certkingdom.com
The full results of the New Year’s resolution survey include:
Get Organized: 61 percent of respondents pledge to keep their business emails and documents more organized in the new year. Respond Faster: 37 percent will try to be better about promptly responding to business emails and calls. Work After Hours: Only 19 percent of workers want to cut down on addressing business emails or voicemails during their time off work.
It is estimated that 247 billion emails are sent per day (according to Pingdom). Rather than cutting back, US workers are focused on how to get more out of business communications activity. By pledging to stay organized, Americans are ready to become more productive in our post-recession economy.
“The question is what tools do workers have to contend with email, voicemail, phone calls — really a proliferation of message volume and channels,” says Jonathan McCormick, COO, Intermedia. “There are options you can personally undertake to improve your productivity — like automatically filtering newsletters and non-urgent material to particular files. Companies are also giving workers the convenience of accessing all their communication tools — email, office phone calls and voicemail, instant messaging — right from their smartphones.”
The business communications experts at Intermedia have some tips to offer for the New Year:
Work off your business priorities, not your email inbox. Highly productive workers use email as a communication tool for business results, rather than responding to emails as they come in. Focus on what needs to get done for your job and prioritize email review and response with that in mind. Collaborate online rather than simply sending messages back and forth. Email is great for communication, but not always the best tool for collaboration — like working on editing documents or giving employees central access to the same files. Tools for document management solve this problem and are available online. Unify communications to get back one hour of your life per day. Rather than use separate tools and devices to check email, make phone calls, and instant message colleagues, businesses increasingly use “unified communications” to combine them in one tool — often Microsoft Outlook. Sage Research estimates this system can increase productivity by over 12.5 percent, or one hour per day for each worker.
ABOUT INTERMEDIA Intermedia is the premier provider of communications services, including hosted Microsoft Exchange, to small- and mid-sized businesses. For an affordable monthly fee, customers get business email, VoIP telephony, smartphones, instant messaging, fax and other communications delivered as a service with 24×7 support. Intermedia also empowers thousands of smaller VARs and MSPs — as well as select Fortune 500 companies — to sell communications services under their own brand. Founded in 1995, Intermedia was the first company to offer cloud-based business-class email and now has over 250,000 premium hosted Exchange mailboxes under management — more than any other provider. For more information, visit www.intermedia.net .
ABOUT HARRIS INTERACTIVE Harris Interactive is one of the world’s leading custom market research firms, leveraging research, technology, and business acumen to transform relevant insight into actionable foresight. Known widely for the Harris Poll and for pioneering innovative research methodologies, Harris offers expertise in a wide range of industries including healthcare, technology, public affairs, energy, telecommunications, financial services, insurance, media, retail, restaurant, and consumer package goods. Serving clients in over 215 countries and territories through our North American, European, and Asian offices and a network of independent market research firms, Harris specializes in delivering research solutions that help us — and our clients — stay ahead of what’s next. For more information, please visit www.harrisinteractive.com .
METHODOLOGY This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia from December 7-9, 2010 among 2,257 adults ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact Julian McBride at 646-202-9775 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 646-202-9775 end_of_the_skype_highlighting, julian.mcbride@horngroup.com .
(1) Respondents are employed US adults who have a New Year’s business communications resolution. This survey was conducted online in December, 2010 by Harris Interactive on behalf of Intermedia.
No Comment