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Europe's Largest IT Company To Ban Internal Email
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, Europe's Largest IT Company, wants a 'zero email' policy to be in place in 18 months, arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful, and that staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week. 'The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool,' says Breton. 'The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.' Instead Breton wants staff at Atos to use chat-type collaborative services inspired by social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter as surveys show that the younger generation have already all but scrapped email, with only 11 per cent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it. For his part Breton hasn't sent a work email in three years. 'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I agree that most emails are useless (starting from those which are sent just FYI, but are still distracting and interrupting the workflow).
However, if there is one thing I learnt by working in a megacorporation, is that _everything_ has to be in writing at some point.
So many times a colleague or supplier will say "sure, we'll do that no problem" and then weeks go by, without anyone remembering.
For accountability, email is still the way to go.
"Sir, people are using our communication tool for unproductive social activities."
"Quickly, build an internal system which is modelled after even less productive, more overtly social software."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
So people are receiving lots of emails, of which 90% are useless, and this guy decides the solution is to switch from emails to 'chat-type' services. So now you've got lots of chat messages, of which 90% are useless. Problem solved?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
When it comes to useful communication, talking is usually one of the most inefficient and ineffective ways to get real work done. Whatever slight advantage might come from the realtime aspect of it is immediately lost several times over due to the lack of any history being retained. This makes it far more difficult to refer back to it later, to share it with others, and to search through large volumes of it.
In most businesses, those people doing the real bulk of the work tend to prefer written communication. It's just a far more efficient way to work. In turn, those who prefer verbal communication are usually those who do the least real work. They're the ones who sit in meetings or phone calls all day "planning" or "discussing strategy" or otherwise not doing anything useful.
I work almost entirely in email. I hate talking on phones. I hate ringing people. I hate being called.
The phone is so intrusive, it's like the person doing the calling has no care about what the person being called is doing, they think they are the most important thing ever and you should be sitting there just waiting for their call. Telephoning somebody, to me, is like walking up and interrupting the other party when they are in a conversation with somebody else.
Email by contrast is fundamentally polite and efficient, you send the message and when it is convenient for the other end, they reply.
The same problems that phones have also apply to other forms of "instant" messaging.
Most people have no trouble working over email, the few who do I generally find either have some disability (dyslexia), or are just plain demanding and really do believe that they are the most important person and can't understand why you won't spend hour upon hour on the phone listening to their inane drivel (and woe betide you should bill them for it).
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The reasons I prefer email for business are:
- it forces people to organize ideas somewhat instead of babbling around.
- it leaves a trail. There's no argument that someone requested X instead of Y for product Z.
- it can be forwarded, shared and printed.
I have clients that insist on using Skype. They spend 30-40 minutes discussing stuff that could be summarized in an one-paragraph email. During all the talk I have to keep notes, then organize the items discussed and make a doc that I send back to the client asking if they're sure this is what they wanted and then share it with my team. Overall I don't save time.
I can't speak for anybody else, but for ME email is still the preferred business communication tool.
This is so sad. It's a symptom of a much greater problem: We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education.
The little Johnys and Janes are barely literate. Composing even the simplest prose (to answer an email or any other written communication) just takes too long for the average person entering the workforce today.
Several potential suppliers have lost my business by not doing email. I work in IT and they try to get me to use a fax???
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The problem is the culture. The fact that there is a poor signal to noise ratio in employee communications is unlikely to be remedied by simply swapping medium... The garbage will just come through the new channel. The situation will only improve if people begin thinking about what is necessary to communicate, rather than spamming every thought that comes into their mind.
Of course, banning *all* forms of electronic, textual communication might help this... but it doesn't seem (from the summary at least) that this is what's being suggested.
How many 'legal organizations' do you work with, exactly? We have about 600 clients, many in the legal/financial markets. Most have retention policies requiring years of emails to be kept. I believe law requires some financial institutions to archive email for a number of years as well.
"Why do they do this crazy thing?" asks the five minute attention span twitter generation of teens and twixties that have never held a full time job with any more responsibility than making sure that a coffee had extra cream. They do this to cover their asses. One email, a SINGLE email, can make the difference between a multi million dollar lawsuit or a lost account that pays your salary.
Both of which can be trivially faked, but then lots of legal matters hinge on something as ridiculously arbitrary as a signature - a random mark on a piece of paper which is even easier to fake.
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If it's really important, someone will call....
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me? send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote, and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget.. With a call as soon as you hang up i can't go back and replay it. If someone calls me and asks me to do something the first thing i always ask is for them to send me an email or IM with the request.
Also with phone they expect an immediate response, and so i have to interrupt what i am working on to respond to them. and all too often if they leave a voicemail it is just "please call me back" with no detail of what they had wanted and so now i have more wasted time calling them back and half the time they aren't there so i have to leave a voicemail "i called you back, but you weren't there, what was it you wanted?". this would all have been solved by a simple email to begin with!