Could Your Business Survive By Banning Email?
The head of Europe's largest IT firm wants to impose a "zero email" rule on his employees' internal communications.
Thierry Breton is the CEO of Atos. He argues that only 10 percent of the average 200 emails per day each of his employees receive is useful. Breton also says that it's unacceptable for his staff to average 5-20 hours per week dealing with email. So within 18 months, he wants to stamp out the use of internal email in his company.
He's right about both of these things. Most email is not very useful, and dealing with email takes more time than it should. But he's drawing the wrong conclusions.
Why Email Still Has a Place
First, Breton wants to cut "useless" information out of the picture by moving to other communication methods. For some reason, he thinks that Facebook, IM, and even phone calls will be more productive -- across the board -- than email.
It's a terribly shallow way of viewing the problem. If you're like me, you value the ability to use email as asynchronous communication, allowing you to deal with a message when you're ready to do so.
IM and phone calls demand your immediate attention. They're far more likely than email to break your concentration. That's especially true if you're using an IM tool that reports your status -- are you really going to blow off a whole string of instant messages from your boss when your status says "available?"
Then there's the ability of email to document a conversation. You can record decisions, requests, requirements, and other information. If there's a disagreement, you have a shared record of what transpired.
IM logs can do some of this, but usually not very well. And phone conversations? Forget about it.
Making Employees Pay to Satisfy a Fad
This probably doesn't matter to Breton -- for all I know, he's got a full-time staff devoted to recording his every utterance. He says he hasn't sent an email in three years, and I'm sure that he's right.
But his employees are going to pay for this decision in a thousand different ways. I wouldn't be surprised if they spent twice as much time trying -- and failing -- to adjust their work routines to satisfy Breton's peculiar vision of how people should work.
Oh, and lets not forget about the lawyers. I'm sure that a company like Atos gets into its share of legal disputes. Sometimes, a paper trail can make matters worse. Other times, however, it can get you out of hot water. Take it away, and you can't document your side of the story.
Part of the problem here is that Breton sounds more like a teenager with a short attention span than an adult business leader. He sees evidence that the kids these days avoid email like the plague, and now he thinks that's a good idea for his company.
Who Makes the Choice?
The problem: Those kids don't work for a living. Their careers don't depend on their ability to capture information, record important decisions, document their work -- and, yes, do more than a little CYA from time to time.
All of these other communication tools are important and useful. A smart business leader will encourage employees to adopt them and to use them in ways that boost their productivity. Most employees can be trusted to make such decisions, so why not empower them to do so?
But a blanket prohibition on email doesn't sound very smart to me. Breton isn't curing a disease, he's just trading for a new set of symptoms. And 18 months from now, when his experiment is complete, I doubt that he'll be very happy with the results. This is no way to run a business, and it's definitely no way to approach the use of business technology.
