"Just shoot me an email."
It's a phrase frequently used in the workplace, but how effective is the tool for today's business needs? Chief Executive Thierry Breton of Atos, a French technology firm with 74,000 employees in 42 countries, has his doubts.
Breton announced in November that he is going to phase out Atos' use of internal email during the next 18 months because he believes the volume of email is "unsustainable," citing that only 10 percent of his employees' 200 daily emails are pertinent, and the rest distract and reduce productivity. Breton, who recently told The Wall Street Journal he has not sent a work email in three years, said his employees will communicate through real-time workplace communication tools such as instant messaging, wikilike documents, texting or face-to-face communication.
Breton's decision has some questioning if this is a publicity stunt. But recent surveys and research suggest the CEO might be leading the charge on an emerging trend.
A Robert Half Technology survey in August found that 54 percent of chief information officers at U.S. companies with at least 100 employees believe that real-time workplace communication tools will surpass traditional email in popularity within the next five years. And among the younger generation, the future of America's workforce, statistics are more favorable toward new communication tools.
A September Pew Research Center study found that 95 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 send or receive an average of 109.5 texts per day, which is more than double that of 25- to 34-year-olds, and 23 times that for those 65 and older.
What is email's function in corporate America today and in the near future? We asked David Grossman, CEO and founder of The Grossman Group, a Chicago-based strategic leadership and internal communication consulting firm for nationwide companies such as McDonald's and Microsoft, and Daniel Mittleman, associate professor of information systems in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University in Chicago, for their opinions.
Q: What is your initial reaction to Atos' internal email ban?
Mittleman: I don't think (Atos is) doing this as a PR move. I think what they're doing is very intelligent. He's saying, realistically, that people are spending too much of their day on internal email. They're already at a point where they can't do eight hours of work in an eight-hour day because of the information coming in. You can't possibly read everything there is that's useful to read. He's touching on a very general problem that's hitting everyone.
Grossman: It's great to talk to employees about cutting off email, but from my research it's not the biggest issue that would make (Breton's) workplace more productive and a better place to work. It might solve an irritant, but he's getting at the symptom and not solving the larger problem, which is poor use of email.
Employees don't need stunts, they need senior leaders who are serious about gathering data and working on fixing what's not working, and making it better for the people who are working there.
Q: How effective do you think real-time communication is compared with email?
Mittleman: It's about communication versus collaboration: Communication is transferring messages back and forth; collaboration is working together toward a shared solution. Email and chat are communication platforms, whereas wiki or Google (Docs) are collaboration tools where people are working together to build something.
You don't get work done by communicating around and around. An example of this is trying to schedule a meeting with a group of six people and email around and around to find the right time. Or you can post a scheduler, and everyone posts their free time in it, and you save a lot of email messages by having the right communication tool.
Grossman: There's a huge value in email with global organizations. I can send an email to Asia from the U.S. and, typically, when I get in in the morning I'm going to have a reply. I can IM someone in Asia at 5 p.m. in the U.S. and I'm not going to get anybody.
Email is best used when you need to share detailed information, where there is some kind of record in writing or when it can direct someone to an online source. One of the best reasons for an email is to follow up or summarize a face-to-face conversation.
Q: How important is face-to-face communication versus having the majority of your conversations over email, texting or social media?
Mittleman: It is appropriate to use face to face when one needs to be explicit in communicating a message (and wants to convey emotion along with the message). It is appropriate to use when requiring to know that the message was correctly interpreted.
