Adios, email
French IT firm, Atos plans to ban all email within eighteen months, according to The Telegraph, as the CEO Theirry Breton hopes to get all 80,000 of his employees in 24 countries to use text messages, phone calls and chats in person rather than email and will point them to social networking tools.
The CEO and former French finance minister seeks to promote a collaborative internal social network with similar functions to Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for email and an accessible global network built to improve collaboration. He says only 10 percent of the 200 emails his employees received per day on average are actually useful and that studies show reading emails as destructive to conversation thus efficiency.
Theirry says he has been “email sober” and not using it at work for three years, claiming it is inefficient and impedes the workflow.
The IT company is the first of its size to attempt anything like this – is it a sign of things to come or is this a rogue company looking to get attention for being different and trendy? Or is email truly inefficient to the daily workflow? Tell us in comments what you think – could you live without email?
Innovative Ones
December 2, 2011 at 12:38 pm
This idea of no email is interesting. I think if the company is having issues communicating internally, they need to set a daily or weekly time to meet and collect thoughts from each division, and pass them on to the hierarchy. Email is invaluable to our mobile development business and communication. For one, many of our team members are on different time, in different parts of the world,etc. As the idea sounds interesting, it would not work for us, however I do think a new type of social circle needs to be uncovered for large corporate communication. Email is neccessary to send docs, and important media that can not easily be expressed in a brain storm session, plus I see employees being less productive if their is no email to track and reply to by date and time, efficiency, by management, etc.. .
Lest keep an eye out to see what happens, I prefer an email notification with an outcome.. Lol
Eric Bramlett
December 3, 2011 at 3:39 pm
They're giving up email, not electronic communication. In a development environment, email is incredibly inefficient. Instant Messaging & project management apps are much better communication tools. Email is inherently disorganized and as a result, wastes hours. When communicating with dev clients, we flatly refuse to respond to any message that isn't tracked by Basecamp or PivotalTracker.