NoMail

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday… No-email day?

Email volumes are increasing exponentially and workers are feeling the strain. While some emails – including, hopefully, Océan Tides – may be welcome, several companies are taking a stand against this prolific form of communication.

Words: Aaron Dalton, a New York City-based freelance writer. He admits to compulsively checking his email.

It is hard to imagine a world without email. How did business get done when people had to rely on smudgy faxes, missed phone calls and painfully slow hand-delivered envelopes for communication? Email epitomizes fast, efficient, low-cost communication. Yet email has become a victim of its own success. Email is so easy, so inexpensive to send, so ubiquitous that it has become a major disrupting factor in the lives of many professionals.

Many office workers in particular spend hours sifting through emails, use smartphones and other mobile devices to continue working and communicating after regular business hours and even compulsively check emails during vacations and weekends. In 2007, a study by technology market research firm The Radicati Group discovered that, on average, businesspeople received nearly 100 emails per day and sent almost 40 messages daily. These totals did not include another 30 emails per day that the survey respondents received on their home accounts. Problems of email overload will likely only get worse—The Radicati Group estimates business email volume will grow by 20% in 2008.

Communications saturation
The numbers of hours in a day remains the same. If email volume increases and people spend more time reading messages, responding to messages and compulsively checking to see if new messages have arrived, they will have less time to perform other tasks. In addition, email may crowd out the other forms of communication—telephone and face-to-face—that have their own advantages.

Around the globe, some companies are so eager to break email’s monopoly on communication that they are experimenting with no-email days. In October 2007, The Wall Street Journal published an article on the efforts of companies including US Cellular, Deloitte & Touche and Intel to ban email from the workplace one day a week (usually Friday).

But these efforts are only the latest battles in a war that has gone on for years between email enthusiasts and those who believe that email addiction has gone too far. Back in 2002, the Liverpool City Council banished emails on Wednesdays. The Council’s 6,000-member workforce was reportedly sending 100,000 internal emails per day to colleagues who might be sitting in the neighboring office or cubicle.

As with most efforts to ban office email, there is no record on how long the ban was enforced or how great an impact it had. Still, that has not stopped other companies around the world from trying email bans of their own. In India, The Financial Express reported in December 2007 that CEO Homi Khusrokhan has instituted a policy of no-email Fridays at Tata Chemicals, the country’s leading manufacturer of inorganic chemicals. The policy is apparently part of an effort to promote face-to-face communication among coworkers.

Backlogs and backlashes
Do these no-email days really work as intended? Ann Poulter, a spokeswoman for candy company Nestle Rowntree says that the company had a ‘No-email Friday’ policy several years ago that encouraged staff to speak to each other rather than send emails. The policy was a success, says Poulter. “Management were confident that the desired effect had been achieved—people were generally sending fewer emails (not just on Fridays) and phoning or visiting colleagues instead.”

But not every attempt to curtail corporate email usage goes quite so smoothly. When Yahoo! Tech reported on Intel’s email-free Friday experiment in October 2007, the message boards overflowed with angry comments left by users who lamented their own experiences with similar corporate no-email experiments. Many of the responses focused on the unintended consequences of the ban. Instead of dealing with emails, workers spent the email-free days leaving and responding to dozens of voicemails. In other cases, when emails were ignored on Fridays, they simply piled up into a fearsome Monday morning backlog.

Banning email is a dramatic and highly visible approach to dealing with email overload, but nobody wants to simply shift the problem to another day or the week. A better approach might be to encourage employees not to be overly reliant on email, but rather to use it as one piece in a large toolbox of communications options.

Mixing and matching
Karina Carretero, an account executive in the Los Angeles office of global PR firm Edelman, says she gets the best results by mixing email with verbal communication. “I feel that picking up the phone or walking over to someone’s desk is sometimes faster than constructing an email and waiting for a response,” she says. Edelman has clustered the layout of cubicles in Carretero’s department to promote such face-to-face communication.

Carretero says that these days people use email as much for documentation as communication. While email helps create a written record of a project’s status or deadlines, Carretero find a personal phone call to clients can be the best way to break through the email clutter. “Two of my clients have thanked me for giving them that nudge because they had so many projects they were managing,” reports Carretero.

Companies fed up with the limitations of email have more options than ever before. In 2005, BusinessWeek reported that European investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein had cut down on email volume and time spent in meetings by promoting collaboration through wikis and the bank’s own proprietary instant messaging (IM) system.

Virtual communities go to work
Other companies are relying on social networking websites to enable a richer form of electronic communications than email could hope to provide. Serena Software helps companies get more benefits out of their enterprise software assets. The San Mateo-based company has 850 employees working in 18 offices around the globe. More than one-third of employees work out of home offices. Plenty of people who need to work together on projects have never met in person and barely know each other’s names.

In an effort to foster camaraderie and teamwork, Serena’s CEO Jeremy Burton and VP of Communications Kyle Arteaga encouraged all Serena employees to create Facebook profiles and spend at least an hour every Friday updating their profile and building virtual communities and groups with other Serena coworkers.

Just two months after introducing the Facebook initiative, more than 92 percent of Serena’s employees had active Facebook accounts. More than 20 separate groups had sprung up just to collaborate on non-proprietary testing and documentation work. Facebook has also fostered communication between colleagues who might otherwise never have connected. One of the company’s developers from the Ukraine chats about a shared fondness for English football with CEO Burton. Other staffers might form lasting connections over their enthusiasm for the same hobby.

Anti-social networking
Not every company agrees with the utility of Facebook as a team-building tool. In July, Web 2.0 blog Profy.com reported that companies including Australian telecommunications firm Telstra and financial services firm Credit Suisse had banned their employees from accessing Facebook at work. The move demonstrates that one company’s collaborative technology is another firm’s time-wasting distraction

Meanwhile, the award for most comprehensive email ban may belong to John Caudwell, owner of UK mobile phones retailer Phones4U. In 2003, Caudwell reportedly banned his 2,500 employees from using internal email altogether. There’s no word on whether that email ban is still in place. Messages left for the company—via both voicemail and email—were not returned.

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