Insight
able type and printing presses. Letter writing suddenly became very old-skool, innit, and peo- ple started referring to it as snail mail. Now, however, e-mail itself is starting to go the same way as letters and, say, Prince Edward: forgot- ten but not gone. A number of companies have been moving away from using e-mail as the primary means
E
-mail was once the greatest innova- tion in written communication since Johannes Gutenberg had a rather clever idea regarding move-
day. At best they are a distraction, and at worst, they result in underperformance and employee disengagement.
Studies like these convinced French multi-
national IT service company Atos to announce in December 2011 that it would eliminate the use of internal e-mail in the company. Thierry Breton, chief executive of Atos, estimates that his managers spend between five and 25 hours a week dealing with e-mail. He says that Atos will ban the use of internal e-mail by 2014. Ac- cording to Lee Timmins, senior vice president
how many internal e-mails the 80,000 employ- ees of Atos were receiving. The study found on average that it was over 100 e-mails per day. After further analysis, some 15% of the mes- sages were found to be useful, and dealing with the rest just resulted in lost time. Thus, in place of email, Atos rolled out a communication pol- icy featuring three kinds of messaging: tele- phone, face-to-face chat and a new real-time messaging platform - essentially, a business so- cial network tool.
The appeal of social networking over e-mail
DEATH OF E-MAIL THE SLOW
of internal communication. With most people receiving an overload of e-mails every day and feeling pressure to answer these quickly, e-mail has become a symbol of stress for employees. Organisational addiction to e-mail has reached the point of dysfunctionality, with employees sending messages to colleagues in nearby cubicles and covering their backs by cc-ing everyone else.
According to a study by researchers at Uni- versity of California, Irvine, people who check their work e-mail regularly exhibit higher states of stress and less focus than workers who con- tinue to do their jobs while being cut off from e- mail entirely. Independent research has also found that a large percentage of e-mails add lit- tle value to the individual’s or the organisation’s
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of Atos Consulting, e-mail has become the dom- inant form of communication and collaboration in business but isn’t the best tool for either of these activities. He says that it is out-of-step with current developments and the habits of younger employees and clients.
R.I.P Email
Most of the young people that Atos hire do not use e-mail after graduating from university. They instead mainly use instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook. E-mail is now considered too formal, and it is an asyn- chronous medium, so people don't know whether someone has read their messages or not. For most young employees joining Atos, it was first time they had ever worked with inter- nal e-mail tools like Microsoft Outlook. So, Atos initiated an in-depth study to see
is that it puts people in control of the information they see. Rather than material flooding unasked into the inbox, employees can subscribe to just the social networking groups and topics they are interested in and read the information at a time of their choosing. Timmins says that collabora- tion tools such as Jive or Blue Kiwi have proven far better platforms than e-mail for co-working. Information that was once parked in an inbox can be more effectively shared using video, with the ultimate aim to create a knowledge bank of experience that can be accessed by all. Timmins says that moving to zero e-mail has meant experimenting to some extent. Focusing on messaging, collaboration and content man- agement, it is about identifying the right tools for the task. Atos wants to create a dashboard or
New European Economy
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