Why the Construction Industry Has Outgrown Simple Email Communication
Why the Construction Industry Has Outgrown Simple Email Communication
While email has been the communication tool of choice for many years, businesses are now beginning to see the advantages of alternative communication channels. With social media, apps, and instant messaging tools, email is becoming less and less relevant. Instead of sifting through hundreds of email chains, we now have applications that allow us to search for messages and people quickly and easily. With technology continuing to advance, it’s clear that using email as a business tool is on its way out. The construction industry is no exception to this. With communication being such a vital component to the success of a construction project, effective construction communication tools are an absolute must.
Table of Contents
To better understand why the construction industry has outgrown email communication, let’s take a look at the inefficiencies of email.
Time-Consuming
According to a McKinsey study, the average worker spends about 27 days a year reading, writing, or sifting through emails. That means that each year almost an entire month is devoted to dealing with email communication. Think about all of the other useful things that workers could be doing with that time!
Unorganized
Think about your email inbox and how many unorganized messages you have sitting there. Each time you go into your inbox, you have to read each message, check and see who responded to what, who was cc’d and so on. I don’t know about you, but just thinking about it gives me a headache. I won’t even get started on how difficult is to search for a specific email out of the hundreds of thousands floating around. Even if you do attempt to file and organize your emails, it’s a job that frankly, never gets finished.
Better Alternatives
With new and improved tools like Slack and Facebook messenger, it’s no wonder that email is on its way out. Chatting channels such as these are much easier to follow and much faster when it comes to communication. This means no more waiting around for an email response that may never come. Digital messaging not only makes your life easier but also keeps all team member accountable.
Less Common
More and more, we are seeing companies and groups of people moving away from email. Colleagues are beginning to contact us through social network sites and apps instead of sending an email. As our colleagues are moving away from email, it’s clear to see that soon we will have no choice but to do so as well.
While our digital messaging tools and specialized business applications may not be the perfect solution for digital communication, they are leading us down the right path. As a society, we are constantly coming up with new and improved ways of doing things, and we will continue to do so. While email was a worthy tool in the past, its time has come to an end. We can’t predict what the future of communication will be, but we can be open to the new tools around us. Switching gears and learning new things can be intimidating, but it will benefit your construction business in ways you can’t even imagine.
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