Tech firm Atos has a plan to ban all internal email. Says most messages are useless and/or spam and that they are akin to "smog" out in the real world. The firm will try to emphasize more use of technologies like chat, video conferencing, and collaborative technologies like wiki's.

I think it's a bold step. How many times have I lamented how much time I seem to devote to just dealing with email (and I don't even get that much). Some tasks are best suited for email, but I'm really curious how this experiment turns out.

Actually, I'm curious about the unintended consequences of this policy. Maybe more staffers will turn to private email accounts or SMS or maybe even social networks, totally bypassing corporate security and privacy measures and potentially opening them up to huge liability. We shall see how this unfolds. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if they try this plan for a while then totally scrap the idea and go back to the way things were before it has really had a chance.

The article is here.

I work for a tech firm. We would come screeching to a halt without email. Maybe this company is different, but this would definitely be the wrong move for us.

We (defense contractor) tried "No Email Friday" once. And I mean - one single time.

Haven't heard of it since then.

Yuck. The facebook style online folders are the equivalent of hitting "reply all" on every single email. You have to wade through everybody else’s whatnot trying to figure out which ones are pertinent to you.

My company tried to do a quasi-social media thing for collaberation. Yeah, even the people who thought it was a good idea stopped using it after a week. My boss had to order me to set up my profile

Good luck with that idea. Arney is exactly right. People at companies that don't have corporate email rely on personal email accounts to function. I see it every day in small businesses.

I almost had my dog trained not to eat. Then it died on me.

I don't see this experiment ending well.

Just from an IT support issue this is a nightmare; when the hotmail and yahoo accounts take over the users would still expect corporate support staff to handle any problems, but they'd no longer have the access to do it.

I suspect someone has a product they are trying to promote. I cannot imagine this making any sense at all.

Spam is not as big a problem these days. We have learned to filter it out in both technical and non-technical ways.

The worse problem is people who CC all kinds of people wih emails that are only vaguely related to that person's job, and 6 months later managers expect everyone who got copied to remember every line written in the thing. It is worse than the mass distribution of memos because it is so easy to do.

I also rarely get any spam messages anymore on my work email. But there are certainly many companies or departments within companies that have a culture of cc'ing anyone remotely connected to you. It's almost like a competitive sport--the more names on the cc line, the more important you must be!

But you're right, ILBob, the ease of sending email to multiple people encourages this phenomenon. Perhaps forcing people to communicate via, say, chat will enforce a new kind of discipline. Fewer messages to bother unrelated people, more brevity, and people forced to jot down only the most important info in a notebook (I already do this with emails).

I've been in IT for 25 years and I think email is a very disruptive technology but at the same time it saves most workers from having to have a secretary and it does provide a nice historical reference for referring back to later on for information.

The problem with email is that it tends to push people to stay glued to their inbox and feel compelled to stop their current train of thought and concentration and deal with the email message. That is very disruptive to productivity in most (but not all) companies. It's not a big problem at most firms but some firms have real problems dealing with it and some don't even realize it's a problem.

I've worked with a lot of companies that do recognize it's a problem and there are several solutions that can be implemented in stages to break the hold that email has. First, you can force a policy down to all desktops and phones that turns off any sound or popup notification of an incoming email. This is the first step in breaking the lure for employees to drop everything and look at their inbox all day long. Beyond that, you can train your staff to set aside a set time to answer emails - for instance every day at 4pm - or maybe twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. This forces urgent matters to be elevated to phone calls or video conferencing and employees can leave their email client closed throughout the day and focus their attention on their work.

Another plan I've helped design and put in place at some companies brings back the role of a group secretary. A secretary serving a group of anywhere from 5 to 10 employees seems to be the ideal size and if implemented the right way, you can make that workgroup more productive and more profitable and they will all use much less email. But they still use email, you just break the slavery aspects of it and the secretary streamlines the communications.

Email started out as a way to supplement and speed up the typing and sending of letters sent through the postal system. In the days of letter writing, people took time to carefully choose their words and think through what they were writing. Once you get a corporate culture where email is a rapid fire short message system, the "well thought out" part of messaging goes out the window. Ideally a company will put in place training and procedures that returns some sanity to corporate communications and that usually involves using much less email but not a complete rejection of it.