Unsolicited commercial e-mail could cost US companies
$874 (£526) per employee a year in lost productivity, according to
a report by independent research company Nucleus
Research.
The report, entitled "Spam: The Silent ROI Killer" contains the
results of interviews with employees and IT administrators at 76
different US companies.
The $874 figure is based on an hourly pay of $30 and a work year
of 2,080 hours, Nucleus said.
Among the other findings of the report are the following:
- Companies lose approximately 1.4% of each employee's
productivity each year because of spam.
- The average employee receives 13.3 spam messages each day.
- Employees spend, on average, 6.5 minutes a day managing
spam.
Most recently, Network Associates released a survey of 1,500
online participants that found users spending 40 minutes a week
dealing with spam.
Joe Fisher, director of product management at Tumbleweed
Communications, a supplier of antispam products, said the cost may
be even higher.
"I would argue it's a bit higher, depending on the organisation.
I think the industry-accepted standard is approximately $20 or $25
per hour per employee," Fisher said.
Still, many of the studies, so far, have focused on the volume
of the spam rather than its effect on business productivity,
according to Ian Campbell, chief executive officer of Nucleus.
"We didn't see any study that dealt with productivity...
questions like, 'If I employ a spam filter, how much time do I get
back?', or 'Am I blocking messages that are costing me time to deal
with?'" Campbell said.
Among the 117 employees surveyed, Nucleus researchers looked for
users with varying exposure to the spam problem, Campbell said.
Nucleus interviewed users with e-mail addresses that had been
harvested by spammers multiple times and who were "besieged" by
spam, as well as those with addresses that had little exposure to
the public internet and so were unknown to most spammers, and
"normal users" who fell in between the two extremes.
A potentially controversial conclusion of the survey was that
spam filtering technology does not lead to significant improvements
in productivity.
"Filtering stops some more e-mail messages, but it only saves
about 26% of the productivity loss, so the cost of spam with
filters is not significantly less than without it," Campbell
said.
The sophistication of spammers relative to antispam technology
and a lack of a consistent education of employees about the problem
are partly to blame for the ineffectiveness of filtering, Nucleus
said.
Although the study still recommends that companies deploy
spam-filtering products, other methods may yield better results,
Campbell said.
Campbell said recent legal action against alleged spammers by
Microsoft and others is, potentially, more effective than antispam
technology and recommended that concerned businesses owners call
their congressional representative.
"You're in a technology war with the spammers. Filtering will
help, but there's nothing that helps more than a couple years in
jail," he said.
Nucleus is hoping that the survey raises eyebrows in the
business community, noting that for every 72 employees, companies
are losing the productivity of one because of spam.
"If one of out of every 72 of your employees showed up to work
and slept all day, you'd be upset about that, but you're losing
that productivity simply because you do not have spam coming
through," Campbell said.
Paul Roberts writes for IDG News Service