Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Eliminating Email

This story is kind of funny when you look into it a bit more.

You’ve got mail–not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.

CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam.  That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months.

When asked how employees have responded to the policy, Crouch told ABC News the overall response “has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.”

Breton,  the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman and CEO of Atos in November 2008.

“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”

OK, so far I’m on board. I get a lot of email and most of it useless or just informational. I’m all for cutting down on email in favor of less blunt forms of communications when appropriate. Sign me up!

Crouch said Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki, which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online content, and Office Communicator, the company’s online chat system which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.

Hey… wait a minute… they are replacing email with their own products? The cynic in me says that this move may have more to do with promoting their own products than in any kind of leading edge cultural shift. I can see the ad now… “Cut down on email by buying Atos communications products!” 

Well played, Atos… well played.

(4) Comments
Posted by Owen at 0705 hrs
Culture + Technology

  1. Instead of using e-mail, I think they should switch to the more productive and more efficient cutting-edge technology of “Electronic M’s”.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 06, 2011 at 0851 hrs


  2. My business partner, with the stated opinion that the future of communication would be via social networking, announce his intentions to take a vacation via Twitter.

    One problem with that. While I may occasionally post something on Twitter, I very rarely have time to read Twitter. So, unsurprisingly, I missed his announcement.

    I did happen upon one of his tweets he made while on that vacation, however. From there, some harsh language was exchanged.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 06, 2011 at 0936 hrs


  3. Yep.  Sounds to me more like a change from writing on white paper to writing on blue paper with maybe pre-printed letterhead on it.  The real change is when people start communicating through neural implants over a wireless network.  Glad I’m gonna be dead by then.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 06, 2011 at 1134 hrs


  4. It’s called Eating your own dog food or just dogfooding.

    Pretty common in the tech world - if you make a product and believe it, your employees should be using it. Or in the case of say, Microsoft - make them have to put up with the same crap they force on the rest of us.

    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 06, 2011 at 1224 hrs


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