Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
No one wants to use email anymore. When I talk with clients, one of the first things they ask for is do I have Skype, ICQ or MSN. For business stuff, Skype is the clear winner. I talk with clients and managers there. It has a clear advantage too, as you get instant answer and can actually discuss things in real time. Everything goes easier that way.
For friends and personal things, it's also only Facebook, Steam and MSN for me. It would feel weird to send email to them, and they probably wouldn't read it anyway. Email is kind of like sending a letter, but in this case it also loses its charm and personal feel. It might been relevant still up to 2005, but now it's all the way Facebook, IM or you know, actually calling someone. I can't say I really miss email either. I still have to use one to receive registration verifications and or some news and stuff like that, but there's nothing personal in email anymore.
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.
I work IT and my company could not survive without email. All of our orders from customers and orders to vendors go through email. We have to attach PDF and word documents too. How am I going to do that with text messaging? Email is the most useful and important IT function we have.
It stops all those pesky logs and evidence of such things ;)
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
"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?
This whole IM thing is no different than a phone call. Some communication requires careful thought and so is best written down so you can think about a response. Email is the perfect medium for such communication. Facebook is a general post to anyone who might read it. When you need a private, considered opinion, email is the way. Or am I now too old to 'get' facebook or twitter? They both seem pointless to me. In fact, moving your employees towards them would seem to be a drain on productivity if nothing else.
This would be the CTO of a company renowned (in the UK at least) for its involvement in a huge number of abortive public sector IT projects. I very much doubt that Breton has much input into those projects though, as Atos is a huge company. He probably does what most executives of his calibre do, and attend pointless senior managment meetings, generally in nice locations with dinner and drink laid on. That's when he isn't schmoozing for more work, a task that generally involves more dinner and drink, all paid for out of the company kitty.
The spoken word will not replace the written word.
Also, some of us have more to say than 128 characters at a time.
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.
So you are trying to claim email - which you can ignore until it's convenient for you to deal with - interrupts your workflow but the IM, telephone calls etc which require you to respnd immediately don't?
You and Thierry have something in common: you're both idiots.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
20 a day are useful!
And sometimes email is the most convenient medium. Maybe you could have some sort of shared feed, but if you want to send something to a single person, that's just email with the serial numbers filed off.
No more lolcats in my inbox? I has a sad.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
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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So longs as their chat server supports: retention, filing/tagging, search, prioritization, attachments, read/unread, synchronous, asynchronous, out-of-office, calendar integration, 'invisible' status, multi-device access, forwarding, delegation, filtering rules, spam blockers, mailing lists with digests, and a couple of dozen more vital features then it will be a great leap forward.
SMTP may be a bit of a silly protocol for an untrusted network but internally it is near perfect. Anyway chucking IMAP and all the rest of our email infrastructure out with the bathwater is just silly.
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.
Should I also lose all of my social skills, stop bathing and whine about how my parents don't understand me.
The youth unemployment rate is at an all time high wheras the unemployment rate for my, email using, demographic is still nice and low.
I'll pass on job related advice from them, or the head of 3rd tier IT company, thanks very much.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I understand why IM / Skype are preferred, and I do the same with my coworkers, but not every communication needs to be real-time. When email and IM are both available, email becomes a "when you have a moment" queue, while IM is "Right Fucking Now (tm)". If someone sends me an email, I'll quickly scan it, maybe flag it on a to-do list, and deal with it when I'm idle or bored.
My expected response times:
Email: 24hrs
IM: 10 mins
Phone: immediate (duh)
The best way to get me to yell at someone, is to mis-prioritize something. Email me a work order, then call 5 minutes later asking why it hasn't been done: yelling. Call me to post an event on the site that's 3 months away, which details you have yet to finalize: yelling. Text me from McBurgerWay to ask if I want anything: yelling.
All three channels have their pros and cons, and should be used appropriately. To completely shun one or two of them, to me at least, seems incredibly foolish and even ignorant.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
and i work for atos... we've been focusing on using office communicator more often - this reduces the cost of conference calls, and allows for realtime chat - love the integration with outlook too - knowing if someone is currently available, if they're about to go into a meeting etc. i do however value email and its "audit trail" but i suppose theres enough paperwork outside of this, and technically, big decisions shouldn't only have an email backing it up?
The nice thing about email is I can ignore it until I have time to deal with it, instead of constantly being interrupted by inane questions.
The other nice thing about email is there is a trail of the conversation I can use to say "No, you said this" and forward them a copy when they change their mind about something and claim I "misunderstood" them, which has saved my butt more than once on bad specs.
It's also pretty much impossible to get everyone online with a chat-type system at the same time, but easy to CC everyone concerned.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I have always wondered why more companies don't use Slashdot own software.
Most email that appears to be useless appears so because it is difficult to follow complex issues in a non threaded medium.
Once a discussion becomes threaded it is much simpler to get clarification to the right question at the right moment (and you don't get tons of email with replies that you don't really need to read).
Another means is to have an internal news website, where important announcements are posted and a short reminder or summary about the days topics are sent, instead of sending one message per announcement.
As for people using email as their main tool for monitoring systems, they have my full and undivided contempt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
You might be right about this. My daughter got a temp job as an admin assistant while she studies. They asked applicants to respond to a fictitious email, then write a reply to a letter using MS word. Evidently that brought the number of applicants going into an actual interview down from twenty to three...
...that it is a record of responsibilities and commitments; especially in a corporate environment.
An example is a company I used to be involved with was purchased by "very large corporation." The people in this "very large corporation" had a MUCH different work ethic than the people in our Company. They ducked responsibility like it was a fresh dose of bubonic plague. They weaseled, they professed ignorance, they tried the 'plausible deniability' route, they tried everything. Once they realized that I kept every interoffice e-mail permanently and I wielded these as a weapon against their insipid mediocrity (a superlative they don't deserve) - two things happened. Our meetings became less about "what? I thought you were heading that up?" and more about "here's our current update..." The other thing that happened is that people tried to avoid responding to my e-mails that pinned them to accepting or rejecting their responsibilities, LOL.
Thank goodness I don't have to work there anymore.
Oh, and yes, it was a European Company that bought us.
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I have heard of temp agencies where I'm from doing exactly this. Particularly the ones that deal with law offices, doctors offices or high-end manufacturing. And you're right -- it definitely weeds down the applicants.
Another company I used to work for would require you give them an email address so HR could send them an email and ask some questions that required longer answers to see how articulate they would be. Seemed to work well for their needs.
"I love lamp."
It's the next big communication medium. Everything on one page. So easy to use.
Deleted
So, he's opted to remove the ability for employees to have a time delay for communication. I don't know about anyone else, but if my life is full of IMs, phone calls, and drive-by conversations and I can't get a blinking thing done. If it's not urgent, send an email ...and most issues at my workplace really do fall into the "not urgent" category. It would be utterly inefficient to interrupt my workflow every 15 minutes for an instant conversation.
Email also has the benefit of making the writer organize his/her ideas better. Plus, commitments are in writing. It's less likely for an email to be misinterpreted, but conversations can always be remembered in "creative" ways. The only people I've ever met who refused to do email were people who didn't want to be pinned down.....wanted to leave their options open, usually to stick other people with the work to do and/or the blame for a mistake.
Maybe they just replied to the email.
FLR
staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week.
Man, so how many hours will they spend if they are on Facebook and Twitter trying to accomplish the same thing?
only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful,
10 per cent is an awesomely high signal to noise ratio in Facebook and Twitter.
I guess maybe I'm old now? But I love the asymmetric nature of the communication, sometime I don't want to talk to you RIGHT NOW but I do need to start or get back to a conversation about something. I also love the ability to store and catalog email threads its useful sometime months later to go back and say on June 12th you me and Bob all agreed to create this page with these features, and here is you saying you liked the idea.
The last company I worked for took it one step further. They just stopped communicating. I told the boss I was impressed they actually told me I was laid off.
It depends on what kind of job you have. If your primary duty is dealing with people, real-time contact makes sense. If you are a developer, an engineer, an architect, or anyone else whose job requires concentration, real-time interruptions are a work-killer. Of course, the PHBs of the world generally do not understand this.
Personally, I have 2-3 work-related phone calls per month. Everything else goes by email or a non-interactive web-service.
That said, there is indeed far too much internal email. If someone really cares about the minutes of some departmental meeting, put them on an Intranet site - don't bombard every single employee with a copy. The same for the latest opinion piece of the CEO, the latest changes to company health insurance, etc. - have a central site for company news, which people can look at (or not) if and when they want to.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
One of the requirements (rightly or wrongly) of using non MS products, is that you also have to know how to babysit people who are. e.g.
Save As...
File Type: Mcrosoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)
Invaders must die
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.
Agreed, I work with a LOT of modern students from ages 17 to 75. Most of them, the younger ones, HATE writing and reading anything. Mainly because it takes them soooo long to do it and requires so much effort. I love writing my college papers because I have read hundreds of books and therefore know how to write and further enjoy it. It is nothing for me to write a report running on for seven pages that is concise and well formed with unique content, for the average student that is like asking for a couple of their finger nails and they subsequently quote dump, plagiarize and "bullshit" their way through it. Drum roll......they still get good grades for the junk they hand in, so they think they are doing a good job. If they later attend a good university they wonder why their English professor keeps handing their papers back to them with "rewrite" at the top. At lesser universities they continue along the lines of the community college and high-schools to keep collecting tuition, simple as that.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
So, I've gone to great lengths to craft mail filters to sort my incoming deluge of company email. I know the offenders who send me volumes of useless junk. I've got filters for all of the distribution mail that comes out of every level of the company. I know that once caught by the filters and diverted to one of many folders, I can spend little to no time actually reading the contents of the folder because there's little to nothing that's actually useful in those emails so going through the list once a day (or less) is a short task. The few internal emails that end up actually landing in my inbox tend to be useful and contain information that I actually need to process. But since there are so few of them I can devote time to processing them.
This is a great system. I end up getting very few interruptions during my day. I can concentrate on my work and get into the zone while I'm digging through my software and I can get something done.
But this guy wants to take away email and replace it with instant messaging and other intrusive communications services that demand my attention whenever some boffin decides to tell the world that he's updated some tool that I never use? Great. Now I have to deal with that crap that I've carefully figured out how to ignore. Instead of having a system that lets me address communication when I have time to do so, I have to now use a system that interrupts me whenever anything is being sent to me, whether the message is important or not. Instead of being able to focus on getting work done, I have to deal with a constant stream of interruptions. Good luck trying to focus on anything when your messenger is constantly pecking at you for attention on an irregular basis.
I suppose it's possible to configure messengers to filter and limit interruptions. But then if you filter the incoming messages so you can go back and read them when you have the time, you may as well just use email since that's better at that style of communication.
The switch to alternate forms of communication doesn't solve the underlying problem that far too many people spam out far too much useless information. My solution to the information overload problem in email is to first get rid of distribution lists and limit the number of recipients for a single email to a very small number. Say 20 people or less. If you need to send information to more people than that, come up with an internal web site where you can post distribution information that people can go read when they feel like reading it. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is almost no need to spam large groups with distribution email.
If you do that, you'll find that information overload will be significantly reduced overnight. Those organizational announcements and IT bulletins that nobody reads won't be filling up everyone's inboxes. The release announcements from the tools group that no one really cares about won't clutter up your inbox. The self important idiot who wants to tell the world about his 3rd quarter financials won't be able to bother people who don't care. The idiot who feels the need to post that he published something on the website won't be able to bother you. End distribution lists and you kill a large contributor to information overload.
So the corporation in TFA is adopting a no email policy in favor of tweets and the like. Doing this because of documented "lost" time spent on email.
Sounds like a trade-off between between the documented time lost to managing emails and the impossible to measure productivity lost to the "But you said... No I did not..." arguments. Note that wrt those arguments, the hit to productivity is not just in the arguing, but also the losses incurred in correcting the mistakes.
I know I have been a pain in the butt to some managers when I have told them on the phone "hey, send me an email so I know exactly what you want done." Usually I did that not because I thought they were corrupt or were wanting to hang me out to twist in the wind, but because they were too lazy to think things through unless they were forced to by the archival nature of email.
Will
Everything that transacts (email, POTS/VOIP, twit/text ...) between people, using a PKI/personal certificate and bio-login, on any network can be proof of participation and responsibility. The network owner would be responsible (potential failure point) for assuring PKI/personal certificate and bio-login forensics for legal purposes.
Voice files with meta-tags are highly compressible. Voice to text transcriptions are possible. Voice recognition would mitigate video (not eliminate) forensics requirements. ...
At sixty, I would be very happy to reduce keyboard-time, and increase voice+face time with some modern information technology.
Let's hurry it alone. How do we solve the intransigence in the workplace/government to define policy, regulations, laws ... to protect personal privacy, accept that technology changes, and TODAY information rules everything in all societies/cultures [So, make it more human natural!].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The issue is that they did not know how to properly setup a letter in the word processing application (Be in MS Word / LibreOffice / whatever).
If you don't know how to either:
A) Use a letter template from the base application install
B) Create your own letter properly with Address / Name / etc
C) Use Google to look up how to do this for the question
You should most definitely be removed from the stack.
We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education.
To be fair, I'm not sure how effectively any educational system could cope with the level of distraction that kids face these days. The development of basic skills - reading, writing, math - requires significant time in practice and drills, and at any given time they have access to gadgets that are much more compelling time sinks.
Same thing.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have no kids of my own, but I have nephews. The oldest is in college at a good quality state university. I had a conversation with him not terribly long ago and it went something like this:
Me: I saw you wrote "prolly" on Facebook. You do know that that is not a real word, right?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: "Prolly" is text message speak. The real word is "probably".
Him: (look of puzzlement and confusion)
Me: I'm not joking. You've never heard of "probably"?
Him: I've only seen "prolly".
When you graduate from an American high school and you are a reasonably intelligent person (he's got a B average at college) and you think "prolly" is a real word and you don't know what "probably" is, the educational system may just be broke beyond fixing.
In France, Thierry Breton is renowned for using a magnificent idea as management: Total Operational Performance, or TOP.
This is Lean management applied to people.
The idea is very simple: we manage people as resources, and if they are unused, they are reallocated elsewhere, or simply discarded.
Result of this brilliant idea: around 15 suicides last year, and more than 60 suicides since he applied his idea.
TOP is so bad that it succeeded in instilling fear in all french companies, which don't want to listen about Lean !
Lean is very successful in automobile industries, too bad for Peugeot and Renault.
Now, he's trying to apply it in Atos:
http://www.rue89.com/2011/05/24/apres-france-telecom-thierry-breton-passe-atos-a-lessoreuse-204971
(in french)
and a lot of people of Atos are very afraid.
Replacing emails by Facebook ? Another brilliant idea !
It's obvious that they will save a lot of time.
And directly speaking with people is so much more productive.