I ditched a lot of classes in middle high school. In retrospect, it was a dumb move. Learning the error of my ways, I cleaned-up my act later in grade 11 and was highly attentive in the critical final year, grade 12.
I was a kid, naive and a little stupid, but not so stupid that I continued the error of my ways. I learned my lesson and was smarter for it.
Some corporations are about to learn the same lesson: ditching doesn’t always pay. Europe’s largest IT firm is revoking employees’ internal email. Atos is cancelling internal email, as its CEO claims only “15% of the 200 emails his staff receives on an average basis are valuable,” according to reports (summarized on Simply Communicate).
Atos CEO Thierry Breton claims his employees are wasting 5-20 hours a week handling email. Instead of the internal communications tool, he wants staff to opt for instant messaging and other chat-like media.
Breton says he hasn’t sent a work email for three years. If employees want to reach him, he prefers they call, text, or visit his office.
Meanwhile, external communication will still center around email, leaving employees vulnerable to interruptions in spite of the internal email ban.
So, let’s see, whether I like it or not, I can no longer receive or send internal email, but I still have to use email for external communications?
This has to be the most intelligent business decision since Paris Hilton took up acting, and then filed for a patent for her trademark saying, “That’s hot!” There are so many things wrong with this decision it is not worth my time to count the ways.
- Remember when email was going to kill the fax machine?
- Remember when the Internet was going to make books and magazines redundant?
- Remember when Atos fell flat on their face for making a stupid, knee-jerk business decision that killed the most dominant and effective corporate communications vehicle in 99.5% of all organizations?
Is email misused? Yes. Does it need to find ‘better balance’ with the intranet, chat, and other social media? Yes. Are employees in a position to still operate effectively without it? No. The decision is just plain stupid.
Good PR; bad business.
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Toby Ward, CEO and Founder of Prescient Digital Media, is a former journalist and a regular e-business columnist and speaker.
Toby Ward, a former journalist and a regular e-business columnist and speaker, is the CEO and Founder of Prescient Digital Media. His white paper “The Social Intranet” is a free download.
I’m a great fan of reducing internal e-mails and as a matter of fact about one third of the intranets in Denmark and Sweden has reducing e-mail as one of the goals for the intranet.
E-mail are great for alerting us but most content should be stored on the server, in project rooms/teamsites etc.
I also think we all can be better at communicating via e-mail but I appreciated that I can search my e-mails and find out what I agreed with another person about. This I also can on Facebook or on my iPhone if I agreed something in texting. I also could find it on Skype if that was where I had the discussion.
But I also see this as a marketing stunt that will not work.