In 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!