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Hear No Evil, See No Evil — E-mail Kills the Phone
coondoggie writes to tell us that in a recent study e-mail has overtaken telephony as the most common workplace communication tool. "Research reveals that 100% of the end-users surveyed use e-mail, followed by fixed-line telephones (80%), mobile telephones (76%) and instant messaging (66%). The study points out the three most ubiquitous technologies increase productivity the most. Over 70% of the end-users surveyed say e-mail impacts positively on their productivity, followed by conventional fixed-line telephony (53%) and mobile telephony (52%). From a productivity point-of-view, the research shows that instant messaging, blogs and softphones are considered most disruptive, and could negatively impact productivity if not managed properly."
Research reveals that 100% of the end-users surveyed use e-mail
Let me guess. They did the survey via e-mail.
I discussed this point with my boss once. I argued for e-mail:
...but with an e-mail, all parties involved have a record of when it was sent, who received it, and what was said.
There may be a record (via phone company) of when a call took place, what number was dialed, and how long it took...
That last part is hard to do with a phone conversation, legally anyway.
=Smidge=
That it really didn't kill the phone. And the overlap between landline and mobile phone usage probably makes that 100% as well. And hundreds of millions of people get their email through a phone line using dial-up or DSL.
Let's say I wanted to ask someone a question, a simple question with no real need for an immediate reply. I send an e-mail. If I were to use regular phone, I have to deal with polite conversation which I may or may not have time for. Not that I don't mind idle conversation, it's just something I don't always want to deal with.
Let's say someone was visiting me and there a traffic advisory, or something else they would need to index later. I would phone first, then text an instruction block to the phone. Same when grocery of component shopping.
And messaging when someone is not around, e-mail is so much better than voice. Mobile phones are not always reliable to relay all the important words, and some people on land lines use really crappy answering machines, but an e-mail will always get the message out.
E-mail is more important than phone these days. That's rather a fact of life. Welcome to the 21st century, where no one has to talk to anyone.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
From a productivity point-of-view, the research shows that instant messaging, blogs and softphones are considered most disruptive
Probably because those three things are more typically used for personal reasons, not business reasons. It's not so much a problem with the tools, but the use. If they became more widely integrated into the workplace, they wouldn't be considered "disruptive".
At any rate, if you have employees that are good at managing their own workflow, you don't have to worry about clamping down on "disruptive" technology.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
People hate voice mail.
It is easier to plan, revise and think-out email.
People are nervous about speaking.
E-mail leaves the ever-important trail to use against people later.
You're already using the computer, so it seems like an extra effort at times to switch tasks to the phone.
And this is the biggest supposition on my part, but it seems that people "look forward" to getting email, where as they feel annoyed anytime the phone rings.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Email for instruction. Telephone for clarification. Remote VNC when the other two fail.
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
I gotta throw out my opinion here, with a bit of perspective from my last employer. Not everyone I worked with was nice. But the mantra was throughout the company, if you can't get them on the phone, hunt them down in person. So when someone got a bug up his ass about some issue, they would call my phone... over and over. You couldn't send them to voicemail... they would know right away you were there... so you had to wait out the three or four consecutive phone calls in hopes that they will just give up. But they rarely did. They would storm into my office ranting and raving about XYZ and they need ABC and whatever else they could complain about to keep me from my work. I honestly fought for an hour with a coworker (salesguy) that FOR THE HUNDREDTH TIME STILL COULDN'T INSERT A PICTURE, FROM FILE, INTO A POWERPOINT PRESENTATION! And somehow this was my fault, because I was the computer guy. But I digress... anyway, even on the phone, they all went a mile a minute, giving me no time to think, no time to compose, nothing I could do where I could come out on top of that situation.
For this sake I preferred email corrispondance. I could think, sometimes over hours, what I needed to say, and constuctively lay it out how the situation needed.
But the old folks out there... the ones who insist I wear a tie, shine my shoes, shave my face TO SIT BEHIND A DESK, actually told me I was no longer allowed to respond to any issues of ANY kind via email. It had to be by phone.
Seriously, welcome to the 21st century. It is the future. A better mousetrap has been made. Quit making me catch mice with a broomstick and a bucket.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I lost points on my last review because of my "over reliance" on email. And I'll probably lose points on the next one.
Don't forget that in a lot of email systems I can tell when you've opened my email and whether you deleted it or not.
Email is its own paper trail AND with magical CYA powers. And that really annoys a certain type of personality.
Now don't get me wrong, email has its uses. However, I would MUCH rather use a phone for most day-to-day business activities. Here's why:
- You're a lot more likely to get an answer in a timely manner if you call the person first, and THEN email them if they're not there, than if you just email and wait for a reply. I don't keep outlook open all the time because I find it a nuisance and it crashes all a time; phones don't crash usually.
- It takes longer to write (and to read) an email than to make a phone call.
- You don't get to show off your communication skills (such as bargaining) as much through email as you do on the phone.
Of course, over both of these, I prefer to walk down the hall to the person's cube and talk to them in person, but that seems outdated these days.
Honestly-- I prefer being contacted at work via Instant message. We have an in house Jabber sever set up. Very convienent. It amazes me how many businesses have no problem using AIM or MSN Messenger to communicate at work when it is fairly straightforward to setup a jabber server.
since I'm in the "document" business, I'm seeing more and more people (thankfully) going from a fax, to using email. A lot of multi-function-printers (MFP) have the ability to connect to a network connection. You can scan to email, scan to fax and also reverse it, printing what needs to be printed, or, fax to a "fax email" box, which would be networked, passworded so the intended receiver has access to the fax. Look at the document, edit, forward, or print, or simply delete. Scan to email, obviously, is a LOT faster than a fax. 20 pages on a fax, can, depending on the quality (or lack thereof) of the phone line can take 15-30 minutes! With an email, it is almost instant.
80% + 76% + 66% = 222% !!!
Over 70% of the end-users surveyed say e-mail impacts positively on their productivity
Where was this survey conducted, PHB-land?
Email is asynchronous. Also, for (legitimate) emails, it's a lot more time-consuming for the sender to type it (~40wpm?) than for the recipient to read it (~a few hundred wpm). It doesn't take as much time -- and can be saved for handy reference, too.
I for one welcome our new SMTP overlords.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
And by "kill" we mean "is used 25 percent more often than", according to one survey. But we might as well have a funeral now, right?
I think the culprit may be that they divided fixed-line telephones and mobile telephones into two separate categories for the survey, but kept e-mail as a single category.
If they had made a survey where the phones were kept as a single category but e-mail was divided into two categories (say a company sponsored server vs. a third party e-mail service like Yahoo) the results would probably have been reversed.
Seems obvious that new tech will replace old tech. That said I still find that picking up the phone gets more done then an email. For the simple reason that people have to respond right away. It's simply harder (but not impossible) to stonewall.
I get the most email, but it doesn't make me the most productive. If you call me on the phone, you will get results. If you send me an email with a due date of tomorrow, I may not even notice it for a couple of weeks.
I look at email that pertains to what I'm doing *now*-- everything else is filed, "later".
fire is still hot, and rain is still wet... film at eleven.
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Email and IM are the tools of choice at work. The crappy voip phones in our office use meridian mail, which I can only surmise was designed as an enormous practical joke on how to make someone quit their job merely over the tools instead of anything strictly job related... and which was accidentally shipped.
Our phones have this big red light on them when you have a voice mail waiting. Since somebody setup Meridian to ask you for a new voice mail password (one you've not used recently) every... what is it, 6 minutes?.. and since someone leaves me a voice mail once every 6 months.. invariably that light would come on and i'd have no way of getting it to shut off. Well, eventually I just unplugged my phone for a while and luckliy, when I moved desks and plugged it in, the light was gone. Now when people call me and try to leave voice mail, they get this horrible message saying this user hasn't setup their voice mail. Say it along with me in your best mortal combat announcer voice: "Flawless Victory!"
In any case, my phone is effectively a 1 way device. I use it to make non-work-related calls, or to dial into conference calls that aren't using pc/ip based audio streaming.
I'd like to dump the phone altogether and use a soft phone that integrates with an IM client. If I'm sitting at my laptop, we can communicate, and chances are, you'll try IM first.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Ever get any that last over 5 minutes?
Damn bitch, too lazy to e-mail me.
Deleted, and ignored, just like spam.
Yeah, Carla, I'm talking about you.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
[VOICEMAIL]
"Um. Hi. Yeah. How are you? I just wanted to call to touch base and see how you were doing. Give me a call when you get a chance. Talk to you soon. Buy."
[Me]
ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz
[EMAIL]
Hey, whats up?
Email wins.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Wasn't there an article on /. a few weeks back that claimed that email was dead? So now email is alive and is killing the phone?
it says 100% email, 80% fixed-line phone, 76% cell phone. That adds up to 156% phone, or probably at least 100% or so. and as for the advantages of email vs phone, both have their grace. email is easier to manage and save. but if you're going to have a conversation involving give and take, face to face is better than phone, which is better than email.
I think if you add the landline and mobile percentages togther, you have 100% "Telephone" usage -- It's like asking if you get your e-mail "wirelessly" or "wired"...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
People are most receptive of using e-mail because it is the least intrusive medium of communication, giving their respondents almost absolute freedom in constructing, or denying, an appropriate response.
What percentage do you get? Why not separate POP versus IMAP as different types of email since it's being done for telephony? My employer, for instance, has got rid of almost all fixed line phones and replaced them with WiFi-based mobiles so drawing conclusions about almost 0% of our staff using fixed lines would be misleading.
A few months ago my company came through the office and tore out everyone's regular phones and replaced them with super-duper Cisco VOIP sets.
... as if I don't have enough passwords to remember already, now I need to sign in to my freaking phone?) but they do have one upshot. If I just don't sign into the thing, nobody can call me -- the calls just roll right over into voice mail. And since my voicemails get emailed to me as attachments (where I can conveniently play them at faster-than-normal speed), I can basically ignore the phone handset and do everything through my PC.
The things are crap (you have to sign into them every morning
By my unofficial count, I'd say something like 30-50 percent of the office is doing the same thing, either intentionally or just because they can't remember to sign into the phones in the morning. I think it's actually boosted productivity -- nobody uses the phones to call around the office anymore, unless they've already sent an email or an IM to see if the person is available on the other end.
Maybe they're not so bad after all...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Sending URLs is a big benefit of IM applications in tech-heavy offices. Our mailserver has a rather significant lag (actually, not everyone in the office uses the same server, so sometimes it can be quick and other times 10-15 mins or longer), and hand-copying URLs leads to errors.
Although something like TinyURL within the intranet would probably be handy (the IT security people seem to really hate it when people use the public one...), the way people were usually sending URLs around was just by pasting them into Notepad and printing the document out. This behavior has almost totally stopped since we got an IM system.
OTOH, IM can be just as annoying as traditional phones because it has a tendency to go off while you're in the middle of things, but at least you can set an away message and warn people off (and suppress messages). And I could see how it could be isolating and lead to a lack of contact if overused. But for "hey, Joe, let me send you the address for that page," it's quite nice.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Unless both parties are signing their messages, either side can edit them to their hearts content, and there's no way to prove who (if either) is being honest. Even if they are signing them, they can simply ignore your message and claim it was never sent.
>With a phone call my attention is solely with one person and >that's just not a good way to operate for MOST functions of
>my day
I always talk on the phone while gaming to kill two birds with one stone and maximize my precious free time. I also dont mind doing the dishes as that is my podcast time.
But seriously buddy,... both my parents and in laws have cordless phones with headsets and both moms talk on the phone while they cook or work in the backyard. And my folks have a cellphone with bluetooth headset (you know, safety on the road) and voice activation.
They seem to have mastered technology faster than you.
Your geek credits have been revoked.
If they would have just asked 'do you use a landline or a mobile in your day to day communications' there wouldn't be silly sensationalist slurs of the statistical sort that we are seeing.
What happens when all 3 go over the very same T1 line, and it being down is the problem? I've always hated the idea of VOIP for this reason alone. It is unfortunate that putting all services over the same pipe gives you a single point of failure, because doing so is very convenient (until the line goes down)!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I really began to appreciate business email while working at my previous employer.
..." stick when I printed out some emails that proved otherwise. There are times when it's been the only real defence against randomly convenient memory loss or bad or outright wrong instructions.
In both cases, one involving a vendor and the other the company's owner, I was able to avoid some serious cases of being beaten with the old "What I told you was
It's amazing how small a piece of paper can cover a large piece of anatomy.
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
Email has overtaken telepathy?
Sorry, I still want my phone so I can do things like call my sister in LA and hear my niece's first words to me, want to call family and actually speak to them on holidays when I can't see them face to face. Email is by far my favorite way of communication, but in terms of maintaining certain kinds of connections with people, I want a way to hear them (or see them) in realtime too. And no--the 6 month old baby does not email. We've simply found that email especially for business is much more consistent and efficient and that has an impact on our personal lives because naturally the same holds true.
We are apparently supposed to conclude that 20% of the people in business do not have telephone service?
I am guessing telephone service in business is 100% as well. Now, we could make a similarly arbitrary distinction between email gotten via pop3 through a desktop client and IMAP email gotten through a desktop client and pop3 through a web client adn IMAP through a web client and I bet all four of those would fall below land lines in adoption.
I agree with you on what you are Trying to say.. but what you actually said was horribly incorrect...
think for a moment here
X % find hard lines useful
Y % find mobiles useful
Z % found BOTH useful
A % found neither useful
X+Y-Z = Number who found either useful
X+Y-Z = 1-A
why?
because X+Y+A > 100%
in your case X+Y alone was > 100%
so I conclude with:
M = % of people who don't understand probability/logic
There are people who like having landlines but don't want you to have mobile access to them
there are people who like mobile and think the landlines just tie them down.... I happen to be one of them.. If I'm at my desk why do I need a landline? Give me a voip Softphone through my laptop so that I can hear the rings and everyone else doesn't have to.. plus I wouldn't have to look up every number on my computer's address book just to dial it in...
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Funny, Overrated, I don't care, just use those mod points so that they re-renter the pool. I want some too! Damn mod point hoggers.
There is a pool, right? I bet there is a pool. Full of moist mod points just waiting to be used by horny slashdotters. Ooh.
You can forge your own headers and logs. It's just text.
You're assuming the organization keeps it's mail logs (most don't, and of those that do, most don't keep them long, and the percentage that would store them offsite approaches 0). Even if I grant you the particularly far fetched scenario where logs are successfully and incontrovertibly presented, that does not prove the mail was delivered or read. Further, the logs don't say what the message contained. It's entirely plausible to argue that you wrote said email an hour ago with a forged timestamp, and signed it then.
Signatures are useful for proving to the recipient that it was you who sent the message. They're quite useless for proving it to others if the recipient isn't cooperative.