Ato. One of the largest information technology companies in the world is to ban e-mails – because it says 90 per cent of them are a waste of time.
The extraordinary measure was announced by Atos, which employs almost 80,000 people in 42 countries including Britain
It believes that too many of them waste hours dealing with irrelevant e-mails, so wants them phased out within 18 months.
Instead they want people to spend more time talking to each other – either on the phone or in person – and to use tightly controlled ‘real time’ messaging interfaces.
Thierry Breton, Atos’s 56-year-old chief executive officer who is a former French finance minister, said the ‘zero e-mail’ policy could be in place within a year-and-a-half.
‘It is not right that some of our fellow employees spend hours in the evening dealing with their e-mails,’ said Mr Breton.
Claiming that only 20 out of every 200 emails received by his staff every day turn out to be important, Mr Breton said: ‘The e-mail is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.
‘The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face,’ said Mr Breton.
He said the main problem was people switching to a 'useless' email while they were carrying out a far more important task.
Allowing e-mails to stack up also means that staff have huge e-mail workloads to pile through when they get home.
Mr Breton pointed to a recent study by the business watchdog ORSE, which reads: ‘Reading useless messages is terrible for concentration, as it takes 64 seconds to get back on the ball after doing so. Poorly controlled, the e-mail can become a devastating tool.’
Mr Breton suggested that a real time messaging interface as available on sites like Facebook would be far preferable to email, with staff also encouraged to talk to each other in person.
‘Companies must prepare for the new wave of usage and behaviour,’ he said, adding that he always preferred proper conversations.
‘If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message,’ said Mr Breton. ‘Emails cannot replace the spoken word.’
In another article from The Bunker:
March 28, 2012 by vancemarriner
It wasn’t all that long ago at all – maybe 10 or 12 years – that you couldn’t assume with any certainty that a person had access to e-mail. The medium was still fairly new and not everyone had adopted it yet. With that in mind, it is a testament to how fast technology moves that we can now seriously pose the question of whether e-mail has already become obsolete.
Some research that was published early last year suggests that it’s heading that way, at least among younger people. It appears that text messaging and social media are supplanting e-mail as the electronic communications of choice among teens and other age groups as well.
Anecdotally, we in The Bunker have observed this trend at work. For example, when we do focus group recruits, we give people an option of receiving an e-mail reminder or a text message reminder (or both) prior to the groups. For a focus group project we did this month, we recruited 32 participants, all age 25 or older. Out of the 32 recruits, 18 opted for a text reminder, and only five requested e-mail.
All five of the people who opted for e-mail were 30 or older.
Admittedly, that’s a very small sample size, but it was still dramatic enough. In light of the information I had already read about people migrating from e-mail to text messaging, I decided to explore the issue further. I posed the question to some coworkers, friends and people in my social media networks (most of whom are 30 or older) and they overwhelmingly said that text messaging, and to a lesser degree social networks like Facebook, had reduced the amount to which they and/or their family members used e-mail. A few parents of teenagers ruefully reported that their kids would barely respond to any message unless it was in text form. Several people said that they check their e-mail accounts less frequently than they used to and now viewed e-mail as reserved for business or more formal communications, and used texting or Facebook messaging for quick, informal messages. Most agreed that response time to a text message tended to be much quicker than for an e-mail. Of the few that still clung to e-mail, discomfort with typing on a small smart phone keypad was cited as a reason for not texting more.
Again, that’s all anecdotal information, but when the message is that consistent and it is in line with formal research findings, it’s impossible to ignore. The implications of this trend for marketing and market research are profound. Any researchers who are using online surveys with e-mail invites, considering the value of mobile platforms for surveys, collecting panel member data or recruiting for qualitative studies need to think about how the technology adoption of texting at the expense of e-mail can affect the age (and possibly other) demographic characteristics of their survey respondents and qualitative research participants.
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