Last post for email

How many emails do you get in a day, and how much time do you spend dealing with them? Ask the typical chief information officer (CIO) or communications specialist and they will tell you the answer to these questions is: too many and too long.

The communications tool that not long ago was anointed the killer application is now considered by many to be the bane of company communication – a short circuit in the corporation’s ability to interact and work effectively.

Mobile email tools such as the BlackBerry allow emails to be sent at any time of the day or night, possibly cutting into leisure time, resulting in disgruntled, tired employees who feel manipulated into working long hours.

Many companies are now taking extreme measures to combat what they see as a growing menace, including bans on the use of email on certain days of the week and bans on the use of copy circulation functions.

The tool that once appeared to be our best friend has turned into an out-of-control monster, devouring our time and destroying our ability to work.

Yet ask the same CIO or communications specialist if they believe email is becoming obsolete and you will get a variety of answers, but rarely a straight ‘No’.

Everyone agrees there is a problem, but few agree on the solution.

Some advocate better staff training, while some say that if you just add a few extra bits of functionality everything will improve. Others are looking at systems, generally falling under the label of online collaboration.

Once thought of as luxuries, collaboration systems are now being considered as alternative ways to get employees to communicate better.

Ian Campbell, IT director for British Energy, the firm in charge of most of the UK’s current functional nuclear power stations, has a vehement dislike of email.

‘Email used to be great, but now it is nothing more than a pain. You go back to your office after a long meeting and find 20 to 30 unread messages,’ he says.

‘What you have to ask is: is the email dictating how you live your life, or are you managing that and what you have to do and achieve and so on?’

For Campbell, email’s most terrible failing is the ‘copy-to’ function.

‘It is a mechanism that allows people to say: “Well, I copied you in; you should know what’s going on”,’ he says.

‘If everyone always copied in everyone within an organisation, theoretically we would all be in perfect communication and everyone in the company would know everything that is going on. But who reads those?’

Email makes it easier to make demands on people, but that is not the same as being effective, says Campbell.

His solution is two-fold. The first part is the piloting of collaboration systems to cut out the fuzz.

‘Collaboration just shifts the emphasis. Say you want news about something such as Unix. You can set up email alerts with all those sites, and they will come in every day without fail, whether you want them or not,’ says Campbell.

‘But if we set up a collaboration site, you can go there and find information whenever you are ready to. Rather than being forced onto you, you can now decide when you want to look at that. That is a huge change.’

The second, more radical, reform is an experiment that Campbell calls email-free Friday. ‘We are trialling it initially within the IT department, but hope to roll it out across the whole company,’ he says.

‘Rather than looking at emails, people will turn their Outlook off and actually go round and speak with their colleagues if they want to communicate with them. It’s going to be interesting to see if they can resist.’

However, even Campbell admits to being a constant BlackBerry user, and says he expects to find resistance difficult. ‘I’m sure I’ll get the twitches,’ he jokes.

Another organisation with big plans to get away from email is the National Grid, which also wants to use collaboration systems to fix its email woes, but in a very different way from British Energy.

Bob Holt, National Grid’s new media projects manager and the man in charge of getting his company to use collaboration, believes email has become a yoke around its neck.

It is funny, he says, that email was once regarded as a privilege. Access to a personal business email account was once considered a symbol of status, not the bane of existence that it is today.

‘Once upon a time, if you had email then you knew you’d made it,’ he says.

‘Now people copy you in on emails just to let you know things, but they also do it to grandstand and show how well connected they are. All these things do is build up a culturally negative perception of the place of email.’

Holt says the idea of banning email at certain times, and in certain ways, is one possibility the National Grid has considered, but he feels that this approach will have only short-term benefits.

‘There are a number of approaches you can take,’ he says. ‘I have heard of organisations that have no-email days, but once the day is over the problem is still there, it is just been pushed away for a little while.’

Instead, National Grid, which owns and operates the principal gas and electricity transmission networks in England and Wales, is installing collaboration system Microsoft SharePoint.

Unlike British Energy, however, the company’s aim is not to reduce the number of emails being sent, but to relieve storage pressures caused by increasing numbers of big attachments.

‘We do not expect to see drastic reductions in email,’ says Holt. ‘But we do want to stop situations where people have been sent big attachment files on their emails, don’t realise it, then get a warning a few days later to say their inbox is full.’

SharePoint will shift the burden of large attachments by allowing National Grid’s email users to send around a link to the file they have posted on the system, it only has to exist in one place. This means that National Grid employees will see far fewer inbox full messages.

‘The attachment aspect is equally, if not more so, important to the social side of the email problem for an organisation of our size, where we have 10,000-plus accounts,’ says Holt.

‘You can just imagine the amount of server space that is needed to deal with all those attachments.’

Holt thinks email as we know it is on the verge of becoming redundant.

‘With technologies such as SharePoint and instant messaging, why would anyone need to use email? The only reason is if you cannot get access to the superior tools now being developed,’ he says.

However, not everyone agrees with this view. There are those who think email would be just fine, if only certain modifications were made to certain popular business email programs.

Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos is among them and believes that email is just a victim of its own success. He believes that with a few simple modifications it will be right as rain. In Drakos’s view, other collaboration systems are useful, and certainly nice to have, but none are replacements for email.

‘What makes email popular is that it gives the user control,’ he explains.

‘The user does not have to go to anyone else to do what they want to do, which is to communicate a message. And the person who receives the communication does not have to do anything, because there is a local store they can access.’

Another advantage of email is that it implicitly allows you to control the message you are sending, says Drakos.

By choosing who the message is sent to, you can limit it to a specific group of people, or just to one person.

‘It is all extremely simple to use and extremely simple to understand,’ he says.

So what type of modifications are needed to turn email back into the helpful communications tool it once was?

‘Beyond training, policies and implementing email-free days, companies need to learn to do something that can be summarised as “bin the worst, reap the best, sort the rest”,’ says Drakos.

‘That means you have to catch the rubbish at the perimeter. That way, there will be no excuse for all the spam reaching end users. The next thing is to start making a lot more use of filtering systems.’

Such technology can already be found on most standard email packages, but Drakos says they are rarely used because few people know how to use them, or even know they are there.

‘It can be set up so that only messages that are addressed directly to me are brought to my attention immediately, while all the others are left there, to be looked at another time,’ he says.

‘The point is to create a mechanism to sort the most important things that need to be dealt with immediately.’

A third mechanism which could get email back to its best is the use of a local search, says Drakos.

‘With this system, it is not important where you put things, so it is very good for something such as managing an inbox, which can quickly get full of lots of different stuff,’ he says.

‘Using some sort of search facility you would be able to find what you are looking for immediately.’

Drakos is confident that if the methods he recommends are applied, 75 per cent of the emails received every day could be completely disregarded.

Often the person most heavily affected by the problem of email overload is the boss, says David Tansley, Deloitte partner in consulting.

Managers, however, can often retreat behind a screen of secretaries and PAs who are assigned to handle emails and filter the in-flow.

‘In essence, managers are using them as a kind of human firewall, because they are no longer capable of processing the huge volumes of data being sent to them,’ says Tansley.

‘They are retreating, retrenching behind layers of support staff and becoming harder to reach – and that cannot be a good thing.’

In the end, it comes down to a communications inconsistency, says Tansley. To make a communication system successful, it has to be open and very usable.

‘But the paradox is that the more successful it is at doing that, the less useful it becomes when it breaks down,’ he says. ‘The pervasiveness and ease of use of email makes it its own worst enemy.’

Further Reading:

Employees lack corporate information