Maija Palmer
Financial Times
Published Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011 11:18AM EST
Last updated Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2011 11:57AM EST
When Thierry Breton, chief executive of Atos, said the IT services company would ban use of internal email by 2014, it caused a sensation across the media, with commentators describing the idea as either ?brave,? ?stupid? or doomed to failure.
But in fact, a number of companies have been quietly moving away from using email as the primary way of communicating within the company.
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The ability to track email is increasingly becoming a turn-off. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in an age of heightened regulation, bankers are eschewing email in favour of less traceable forms of communications, such as hand-written notes. Whether or not James Murdoch, executive chairman of News International, read a crucial email revealing the extent of phone hacking at the business has become a key issue at the Leveson inquiry into press standards, and government officials have shied away from using internal email for communications on sensitive subjects, as these can be made public through Freedom of Information Act.
However, for many companies, it is simply that email is seen as inefficient. ?We believe email is fundamentally unproductive, you need to sift through too many documents and things get lost,? says Leerom Segal, president and chief executive of Klick, a Canadian digital marketing company. ?It has no prioritization, no workflow, and assumes that the most important item is the one at the top. My business partner became so frustrated with how dumb email was, that 14 years ago he began to build better tools for us to manage workflow.?
Klick, which has over 200 staff, now uses email only to communicate with external clients, while internally all messages go through Genome, its self-designed system which enables users to monitor tasks in a workflow. The program works so well that Klick is now receiving inquiries from clients interested in installing the system in their own offices. The company has 10 employees working full-time on developing the network.
?When we started this, we never thought it could completely replace email,? says Mr. Segal. We thought it would be used for specific tasks requiring a response. But before you know it, it was being used for every task.?
Other companies have opted for social networking tools such as Yammer to replace some of the function of email. For example, Capgemini, the IT services company, says it has reduced its internal email traffic by 40 per cent in the 18 months since staff began using Yammer. About 20 per cent of companies are estimated to have experimented with using social networks to connect employees.
The appeal of social networks in the place of email 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 groups and topics they are interested in, and read the information at a time of their choosing.
Other companies, while not necessarily looking to replace email, are looking for ways to lessen its use. Intel, for example, has experimented with ?no-email Fridays? encouraging engineers to solve problems by phone or face to face instead.
Indeed, email has become a symbol of stress for employees, according to a a paper published earlier this year in Organization Science, an academic journal of management.
?Most companies are grappling with email overload,? says Monica Seely, an email management expert at Mesmo, a consultancy, and author of Brilliant Email. ?Companies are losing up to 20 days per person per year, dealing with email poorly.?
Mr. Breton estimates that managers at Atos spend between five and 25 hours a week dealing with email.
Ms. Seely says most people receive over 100 emails per day, and feel pressure to answer these quickly. Studies have shown that a quarter of people expect answers to their emails within an hour, with a third expecting a response within two hours. It is impossible to meet these demands.
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