Maltese workers spend most time on email in Europe

Maltese workers spend the most time using email every day, a study on European employees' email usage habits has found.

According to the study, carried out by the productivity software DeskTime, European workers spend an average of 18.42 minutes per workday using email.

Workers in Malta, however, spend an average of 55.02 minutes using email each workday, the highest recorded in the study.

The Maltese are followed by Spaniards who spend 38.35 minutes a day  on email.

Greeks conclude the ranking's top three with 36.82 minutes of daily email use at work.

The data reveals that employees from the Benelux countries, Austria, and Switzerland spend the least time using email.

DeskTime examined the time spent on email apps and URLs by more than 11,000 users from 30 European countries during November 2022.

Europe's average of 18.42 minutes of work email time is 33% less than the average daily email time for workers in the USA.

According to DeskTime data, Americans spend 27.23 minutes of their workday on email.

This notable difference points out possible diversity in workplace communication, culture, and email usage habits among employees from the two regions.

Moreover, in 2019, software company Adobe reported that employees in the US spend more than five hours on email daily.

2022's significant decrease in email usage in the US and the relatively small amount of time European workers spend using email could be a result of the remote work-induced implementation of communication tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

According to Microsoft, Teams was used by 270 million users in 2022, seeing considerable growth since its launch in 2017, when the tool had two million users.

“Due to the global adoption of remote and hybrid work principles, enterprises have implemented various communication tools and apps into their daily routines," Artis Rozentals, CEO at DeskTime, said.

"Thus, if previously our main communication tool was email, now it's shifted to more efficient tools both for internal and external communication, lowering the time spent managing one's inbox. My team has also successfully implemented several communication apps, and now there are only a few reasons remaining to open my email during the workday.”

DeskTime is a time tracking and productivity software company with more than 380,000 users worldwide. The company regularly studies productivity and work habits, with its most significant study resulting in the viral 52/17 rule.