The best day and time to send an email has been revealed in new data, although following its advice may lead to fewer friends in the office.
A study by Axios HQ has found that colleagues are most likely to read and engage with an email sent between 3pm and 6pm on a Sunday – with an impressive 94 per cent open rate.
The researchers analysed 8.7 million internal emails from between January 2022 and March 2023, from companies with fewer than 50 employees to major global corporations.
If employees are willing to risk sending important emails on a Sunday afternoon, they are the most read emails as they are top of the inbox for colleagues arriving on Monday morning.
But experts have warned it could be another sign of ‘techno invasion’ – where work increasingly encroaches on employees’ personal lives.
The researchers analysed 8.7million internal emails from between January 2022 and March 2023
Axios HQ looked at the best overall send day and send time, before combining the data to discover the key 3pm-6pm window.
The second most effective time for internal email in Sunday from 6pm to 9pm, researchers said, when emails have a 86 per cent open rate.
But workers should not assume that weekends are the time to send all important emails: the worst open rate for internal mail occurs on a Saturday morning, data shows.
During the actual working week, Friday evening is the worst time to send emails, while 3am-6am on Tuesdays and Thursdays both have an impressive 75 per cent open rate.
Even if emails are scheduled to target these times, they can still harm workers’ mental health and work-life balance, experts say.
Dr Matthew Davis, associate professor at Leeds University Business School, told The Times: ‘There’s this phenomenon known as “techno invasion”. And that’s a sense of the work technology creeping into your personal life as well.
‘And we know that’s linked to people feeling more stressed, less satisfied with their work and their work-life balance.
‘My worry would be if people see this and think: “I’ll start sending these more routinely on a weekend”.
‘Because for some people, it’s fine… but there is a good proportion of people that this will add to that sense of a burden.’
Previous research has shown just 9 per cent of British employees are ‘engaged’ with their jobs, ranking the country 33rd out 38 nations
There is also the risk of an email being opened, but then ignored or not read due to employee stress levels or annoyance at the timing of the message.
The researchers admitted that ‘send windows do not always equate to reading windows’ – and the percentage of employees who opened the email does not reflect whether it was properly read or responded to.
Previous research has shown just 9 per cent of British employees are ‘engaged’ with their jobs, ranking the country 33rd out 38 nations.
A total of 41 per cent suffer daily stress, with 15 per cent experiencing anger in the workplace and 20 per cent reporting sadness each day, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report.
Employment experts believe that staff now place a higher value on obtaining a good work-life balance after lockdowns.
There is therefore a greater risk that sending emails on weekends may not be effective as it seems.
MailOnline reported earlier this year that hundreds of UK businesses are advertising early finishes on Fridays in order to recruit workers who now have an increased awareness of their own work-life balance post-pandemic.
