Two weeks ago, Phones4U boss John Caudwell sparked a media blitz when he banned internal email at his company. He claimed employees were spending three hours a day on mail and that the ban would save £1m a month. The fuss showed how much email is now part of our everyday working lives. Ten years ago, only academics and computer professionals used it. Now, people can't imagine getting through the day without it.
That's part of the problem, says Dan Bradley, Communication and Policy Manager for Phones4U. "We want to get people using the most effective form of communication for the task." Email makes people lazy. Rather than think about the message and who needs to see it, people "write a quick email, and copy 20 people in".
Email overload is usually blamed on spam. This ban suggests that concerns with junk mail might be hiding a deeper problem - that by misusing email, we effectively spam our work colleagues. And while you can delete spam straight away, you have to look at work email, if only to establish that you don't need to read it.
Email's ease of use is a double-edged sword, agrees Max Nathan, senior researcher at The Work Foundation. As part of the group's iSociety programme, Nathan is writing a report on information technology in the workplace. Researchers visited eight companies and observed how they used computers, the net and mobiles. Email's ease of use made it very popular, says Nathan, and not just for communication. People use their email program as an electronic filing cabinet. But when every employee stores 1,000 emails, it clogs up a company's network. And: "Some people slip into allowing email to govern the rhythm of their day. They wait for the next email and then deal with it. That doesn't seem a very good way of organising your time."
Nathan says he can understand why people get frustrated with email. "But because it is such a broad and useful thing, banning it altogether is probably not the best way."
Critics have suggested the Phones4U ban is a typical misguided chief executive brainstorm, which Bradley denies. The drive for change came from store managers, he says, who spent so much time on company email, they found it hard to do their jobs. Bradley says people are now comfortable with the ban.
The corporate intranet now plays a role in disseminating information, he explains. It hosts a suggestions page and there's a daily news bulletin. The company sends news/information via text to key personnel, and employees still deal with external email, though they are also being encouraged to use other communications tools, in particular, the telephone.
A less drastic course of action might have been to train Phones4U staff to use email properly. That's the view of Dr Monica Seeley, co-author, with Gerard Hargreaves, of Managing in the Email Office. She has taught executives to use IT more effectively. Now she's spending more time advising on email best practice and performs inbox audits, showing individuals where problems occur.
Seeley applauds Caudwell for raising the issue. "Email is eating dramatically into resources. You can see tangible costs in terms of servers, network capacity and the less-easy-to-quantify costs of employee stress, downtime and information overload." However, she says companies need to set guidelines for how email should be used, and train employees properly. "I think that's the bit Phones4U missed."
Alternative communications technologies - from instant messaging and intranet bulletin boards to blogs - can help ease email overload. US operation Techdirt Corporate Intelligence creates purpose-built "enterprise blogs" for corporate clients. The main aim is to filter and showcase external information, explains Techdirt president Mike Masnick, but they can also ease internal email overload. Often employees circulate interesting material from outside via email, he explains. "But there's no guarantee the right people see it, no easy way to generate a discussion relating to it and no easy way to archive it." Instead, employees could post that kind of information on a blog, says Masnick, who's sceptical about the Phones4U ban. "Banning the technology probably makes it worse, since the 'misuse' will simply move to other avenues."
Phones4U's Bradley dismisses such scepticism. He says he can already see a positive effect at head office. People are communicating more face to face, so that "ideas and solutions now flow around the company more quickly." Ironically, this is what people claimed about email 10 years ago.
However, it's hard to find businesses prepared to follow suit. Dr Seeley says some companies are attempting to ban personal email, but iSociety's Nathan says that might be difficult to police. He found companies either limiting the number of emails employees could send or only letting them send mail at a particular time. Others place a cap on the number kept in the inbox. "But people are very conscious of excessive email. They have realised that you can have too much of a good thing."
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Links
Phones4U
www.phones4u.co.uk
The Work Foundation
www.theworkfoundation.com
iSociety programme
www.isociety.net
Dr Monica Seeley
www.mesmo.co.uk
Techdirt Corporate Intelligence
www.techdirt.com/ci
