GrexIt

Why Atos' Zero Email policy does not make sense

Atos, a giant tech firm with billions of dollars in revenues annually, recently announced that they plan to put in place a Zero Internal Email policy for all internal communication by 2014. This has grabbed a lot of attention, and has invited comments, both negative and positive. We thought it would make sense to try and understand what might be Atos's motiviation towards trying to do this, and whether moving to Zero internal email makes any sense at all.

What is Atos' motivation for moving to Zero Internal Emails

1. Email Clutter: This is a well known problem, and we touched upon it in our blog post CC is Evil. Today, the reason behind email overload and clutter is not Spam, but "Quasi Spam" - email that is sent to a lot of people who do not really need to read the email. Think project related emails being blindly sent to 50 team members, when its directly relevant to only two or three of them. Or the sales staff CC-ing their manager on every email just to cover their backs. Emails like these are the larger part of what leads to email overload. Mailing lists, too, are a huge culprit here. 

2. Attention Switches: For a lot of people, Email is work - think sales people. But for a vast majority of knowledge workers, Email is just a way to communicate about work. Switching from work, which might be programming, designing stuff or solving problems to looking at one's email unquestionably requires an 'Attention Switch', which leads to inefficiency. A lot of people look at their email inboxes dozens of times in a day, leading to many such attention switches. For many, looking at the inbox tends to become almost an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This definitely is a big problem.

Both of the above lead to serious loss of productivity, and its important to do something about both of these problems. But lets look deeper at how Atos plans to solve these problems by dumping email and moving to a different set of tools. 

Do the alternatives to email solve Atos' problems

There are lots of solutions available in the market to help communication and collaboration within companies. Almost all of them are built around three key components: 1. Wikis   2. Newsfeeds or Acitvity feeds  3. Discussion forums. Every solution might use a different set of names for each of these components, but that does not make these components much different from being plain wikis, activity feeds and discussion forums. While wikis and discussion forums are the two areas for people to collaborate in, it is the newsfeed which shows the user whats going on and what is relevant to her. But does the newsfeed do any better than email when it comes to the two problems with email that we just discussed? Lets see:

1. Clutter: From our experience with Facebook and Twitter, we know that newsfeeds can be massively cluttered. There's nothing more distracting than a constantly refreshing, constantly scrolling newsfeed which will almost definitely have new stuff for you to look at every 15 minutes or so. In terms of their ability to create clutter, a newsfeed or activity feed is no better than a set of mailing lists which send around information to tons of people almost indiscrimately.

2. Attention Switches: It is pretty hard to understand how a newsfeed would do better than an email inbox at not drawing people's attention too frequently. It is very likely that for a person in a company on a typical day, a newsfeed would have more content scrolling through it than would land up in her inbox. That would almost definitely translate to more attention switches and loss of productivity.

It is not hard to see that the core of Atos' problem is not email, but the way people use email. And its not clear how that is being taken care of in alternatives to email. If anything can solve the problem, it is discipline and the exercise of right practices while communicating with colleagues. 

What really needs fixing

What really needs fixing is not email, but how people use it. More discipline in two area can help nail it:

1. Who do we send email to: Stop CC and mailing list abuse now! Send an email only to people who it is directly relevant to. Don't send email to people 'just to make sure they know what I'm doing' or 'cover my back'. Every email one receives takes them time to read and dispose of - and that holds true for you too. Do unto others what you'd wish them to do to you.

2. Stop staring at the inbox: Looking at the inbox every fifteen minutes would not make an email with a pay raise land up from nowhere. Clearly demarcate time for dealing with your email. Once in the morning, afternoon and evening each are enough for most people. Try sticking to that.

How hard is it to fix

(2) above is an individual problem, but (1) is more than that. It is systemic, because people don't CC tons of people on emails just because they're used to it, but because of the dynamics of the functioning of a company. Sending an email to a lot of people is a defensive tactic, with the simple intention of letting all of the recepients know that "I did that".  That is not an individual problem, but actually a systemic one.

What really needs fixing is the systemic problems, not deploying a new set of tools. If the fundamental problems remain, any set of tools would ultimately be distorted and given a shape that they must take to accommodate the very problems they were deployed to solve.

Basecamp should love email a bit more

If you've used Basecamp, chances are pretty high that you love it. We do. I have, in the past, used Basecamp to manage a bunch of consulting assignments, and Basecamp really made our life easy. We have worked with many task management and collaboration tools, and I must say Basecamp takes the cake when it comes to being simply, purely functional. For projects that are not very long drawn and not very complex, Basecamp offers just the right set of tools to get the work done smoothly.

But having used Basecamp to manage and collaborate on some fairly large projects that ran for more than 2 years and involved around 15 people, we have come to believe that Basecamp needs to play much better with email than it currently does. The following are some of the scenarios that came up while managing some really large projects which made us think so:

  • Email conversations on a project happen even before the project "starts": Before a large project starts, and is even finalized, there are loads of communication about the project regarding architecture, design, technology and planning. In a consulting set-up, a lot of this happens before the project is awarded to the contractor / consultant / freelancer. Now once the project starts, communication can almost completely shift to Basecamp, but all these email conversations with useful information stay inside email inboxes, completely detached from where all the action is happening. 
  • While Basecamp gives a place for all team members on a project to interact on, there is a lot of communication which might need to involve people who are not team members on the project. Example: while working on a specific problem on a project, you might need to talk to experts who might not be a part of the team working on the project. Some of them might not even be a part of your company. In scenarios like this, the communication mostly happens over email, and again, does not show up inside Basecamp.
  • Feedback, issues and bugs reported by users, customers, testers and friends end up becoming tasks in Basecamp a lot of times. Now since a lot of these issues reported are over email, Basecamp seriously lacks ways to convert such emails into tasks, and then also continue the conversation with the person who reported the issue from inside Basecamp. 

There are other scenarios too, but these are the most important ones. In general, we strongly feel all collaboration tools must play very well with email in order to be completely effective.