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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.

Email and Knowledge Management: The Possibilities

Being able to retain knowledge and draw on it makes good companies great. Knowledge not tapped into and lost translates into real, hard cash losses. Organizations around the world have realized this, and Knowledge retention and management are now well identified areas of research and activity.

For a Knowledge management strategy to succeed, it must tap into knowledge where its created, and in the process of its creation. That is what makes email extremely important for any Knowledge management plan. For a lot of us, our mail inboxes are the most important go-to source of information at work.

Email really goes way beyond being just a communication tool. With multi-GigaByte inboxes that we are used to now, our email inboxes are probably the richest sources of information and knowledge at our disposal, containing information that is inherently very contextual because it was sent to us by someone who thought it makes sense to us. If you are using an email service with very high quality search like Gmail, searching your inbox almost becomes second nature. Along with the power to organize your conversations offered by labels, your email inbox transforms itself into a potent tool that stores stuff that is of immense value to you, and also makes finding useful stuff very easy.

Now if we could go beyond being able to search just our own inboxes, and could obtain the right information from the inbox of any of our colleagues, that could turn out to be an extremely potent tool. I could instantly find:

  • Answer to a question I have which was answered by someone in my company an year back
  • A document I need from a colleague's inbox
  • Know if someone else has handled a client query similar to what I have to answer now
  • Quickly find who in my company interacted in the past with a client, a vendor or a service provider

The list can actually go on endlessly. The challenge here is to enable access to the 'right stuff' from people's inboxes,and to the 'right people'. Making email a part of the Knowledge Management strategy of a company can help its people achieve very high levels of productivity.

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This post draws heavily from our earlier post "The Power of the Collective Inbox". This post also outlines the core idea behind our product, GrexIt.

 

 

Why Email Rocks - A Quick Round-up

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We gave email a piece of our mind in our last blog. But lets be fair, email rocks big time at doing a lot of things, and its not without a reason that we are inseparable from our email inboxes. Just trying to sum up a few below.

  • Everyone has email. Well, just about - Its almost certain that whoever you are trying to get in touch with has an email account. Also, someone you've just met will more readily share their email id with you, than their phone number or social network contact.
  • For most people, stuff that lands up in their email inbox is more relevant to them than what they see in the Facebook or Twitter feeds. Social network feeds are 'broadcasts', while emails you receive are 'directed messages'. A higher relevance is built in.
  • An email requires an immediate call to action - open it, and read it. If you want to ask someone to do something specific, you are far better sending them a direct email than broadcasting a feed on a social network.
  • Is asynchronous - people can check when they want to, respond when they want to. That is quite unlike phone calls. With email, you can either check it once a day, a few times a day, or even use push email and have all your email sent to your phone so you can check it very frequently. It gives the recipient a lot of control on when they would like to read their communication, and when they would like to respond.
  • It does not depend on whether the person you are mailing is (1) online or not (2) sleeping or awake (3) working or hiking (4) in their office or on a holiday. There is no 'wrong time' for sending an email. You can just send it when you want, and the recipient can read it when they like. That, combined with almost guaranteed attention from the recipient helps achieve a unique balance - You can get the recipient's attention without having them stop in their tracks and respond to you.
  • Its free! Well, just about.

 

Email - The Knowledge Morgue

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Shocking, but true. 

You inbox is buzzing with useful stuff: questions and answers, little tidbits of information, links to websites and documents that hold a wealth of information. The wiser among us might already be using labels/folders to organize stuff so that they can easily discover important emails when needed. Many of us might not realize the potential of the contents of our inboxes and probably even delete stuff they might need later, or never bother to look in their inbox to see if there's stuff there that might be useful to them.

There's another aspect to this - some content in your inbox is useful not just to you, but can also be useful to a lot of other people in your workplace who were not a part of the email discussion when it took place. Simple proof - we have all sometime in the past forwarded discussions from our inboxes to people who needed the information or attachments contained in them.

And that leads us to the crux of the problem - There's a whole lot of useful content lying in our inboxes which can be useful to others and to us, but would never be discovered because:
  • others don't know whats there in your inbox that can be useful to them
  • you might delete stuff that can be useful later
Isn't calling your email inbox a knowledge morgue not really an overstatement?