A Workplace Without Email?
SteveIn what I promise will be my last blog post about email, (really, is there anything more tedious? Except of course people who Tweet about phone calls they just had. So annoying. I mean would you ever have an online Tweet exchange with someone and then call someone else on the phone to let them know you have been tweeting away with the first person, and how 'amazing' they are? No one cares who you are talking to on the phone. Get over yourself.).
So anyway...
Today I saw the follwing Tweet from Sarah Goodhall (@tribalimpact) on Twitter:
Initriguing, no? Clicking through to the link mentioned in the Tweet reveals the details of the story:
Atos Origin moves to be email free in three years. Doable?
Atos Origin is an international IT services company, and a very large one, with approximately 50,000 employees worldwide. It's CEO Thierry Breton has come to the conclusion that email, in its current incarnation and use inside Atos Origin is no longer adequately serving the information sharing, creation, and collaboration needs of the large, far-flung organization.
He wants Atos Origin to be a 'zero email company' within three years.
Money quote from the Computer Business Review piece on Atos:
So why the big move? Because email is not helping any more, basically. "The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business, with managers spending between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails... We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. [So] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."
Man - first time I have ever seen 'email pollution' compared to filth-belching smokestacks. But in a way I get it. Just like industrial pollutants fill the air and waterways, little by little, always more, more, more, our email inboxes never seem to ever truly 'empty'.
More from the CBR article:
Breton argues that social media community platforms and collaboration tools are much superior ways of letting his employees share and keep track of ideas "on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales".
That experience, he says, has prompted him to conclude that "Businesses need to do more of this - email is on the way out as the best way to run a company and do business." Use of such replacements has already cut email use by up to 20%, claims the firm.
Makes sense - if a reduction of email volume of 20% is seen as a great benefit to the organization, and its harried managers, then why not shoot for 40%, or 70%, or as Atos Origin is going for, an elimination of all internal email.
Can Atos Origin, a 50,000 or so strong organization completely free itself of email in the next three years? Perhaps. But there seems to be no doubt if they can succeed, and do indeed see increased productivity, profits, and happiness other organizations will surely try as well.
Need to run, in the 20 minutes it took to write this post, I got about 33 new emails......
Have a great weekend!
Reader Comments (8)
I love this mentality and think it actually marries technology and business in the way it was meant to be. The common complaint when email first came out was that it took the social out of business. Conversation lagged and debate was smothered. In fact, a blog post I wrote a long time ago was about an exercise I still do today--"A Day Without Email." It forced teams to get up from their desks walk across the office or pick up the phone and solve problems through conversation, leaving email for what it did best--push information. The end result was much more always got done and relationships grew, in a day. So from a day without email to a lifetime. I'm all for it.
Steve
I think it is a misguided comment to state no e-mail in X years. The rel issue is about giving people choice as to how they receive information be it text, e-mail, status updates, DM's etc. Yes, volume of e-mail may drop but that is more about choice and relevancy than e-mail itself.
Peter
I would be happy just not to be cc'd on every email from people just making sure they cover their asses.
SuccessFactors is claiming to do this by incorporating some social aspects of CubeTree into their apps. And the thinking makes sense to a point.
Today, you might send five people in your work group an e-mail and then deal with five separate responses (to everybody, of course) that rarely come in chronologically and only a few have read all the other responses first before responding themselves.
With a closed social group for the same purpose, you post your comment (formerly an e-mail), everybody responds to you and to each other and everybody reads it. Just once! Still a lot to read, but a lot less partially-informed garbage, too. And certainly more efficient.
Getting rid of one-to-one e-mail is another thing entirely.
@Susan - Thanks, I really like the 'Day without email' idea. I think it is something, or at least a version of something, we see advised often. Look at email only a couple of times a day, deal with everything, and then shut it off to concentrate on your 'real work'. But sadly it seems like answering email is often what the 'real work' becomes.
@Peter - I imagine you are right in that it will be hard to totally eliminate internal email at Atos. But it seems like the main pre-requisite for widespread adoption of new collaboration tools, namely executive support, is in place, making the chances greater than they would in a grass roots effort.
@Brian - Just one of many reasons, and an important one, for the flood that arrives in inboxes every day
@Bill - I think you are on to the more likely evolution for these tools. Communicate and correspond about a project, in the context of the project, whether that is in a dedicated project space in a tool like Cubetree of Jive, in a lighter tool like Yammer using groups and tags, or even in a more advanced connectivity suite like Tibbr. Use email to have private, one to one information exchanges and discussions.
Great post! Small biz providing big inspiration for social media marketing. Some small companies that are proving they can hold their own in the social media marketing world.
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It seems to me that there is a great demand for reduced email. So many people are speaking up on this issue that it's impossible to ignore anymore. The more emails you get the less productive you are. The spirit of collaboration gets diminished because emails are more like monologues rather then dialogues. In my opinion, if somehow social media could be used to fill in the gap and create a true dialogue, productivity will then increase once again.
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