Dec
Email bites back
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Email bites back
For a while now I’ve been of the view that a long term goal of any organisation is to reduce massively the volume of email it generates. My reasons are various and range from breeding a culture of communication dependency to swamping employees with unmanageable volumes of information to locking organisational knowledge in inaccessible places. Coincidentally, today’s Times carries a great article about this very subject and suggests that the heyday of email may well be passing.
But sifting through employee comments made in a recent communication survey, email was most certainly biting back. The client in question has put significant effort into developing and encouraging the use of various collaborative tools and whilst those are gaining traction, it has created a more complex environment that presents employees with a potentially bewildering array of communication choices. Consequently, a quiet but discernible voice requesting that the Inbox once again become the communication portal supreme was clearly audible.
It’s been a while since I heard anyone suggest that more email might lead to better communication so I’ve given some thought to how I (and my client) might respond and arrived at three thoughts.
- Change takes time. It’s a fact of life that people adopt at different rates, whatever the change. This means we have to handle any shift away from email in the same way we would any other; by managing the change curve, finding and exploiting early adopters and above all making the change meaningful and of benefit to people.
- Clarify channel roles. My colleague Alan Richardson is writing a series of posts about the roles for different channels so I’ll leave that to him. But what’s obvious to me is that we have to be very clear about the role of any new channel we introduce and ensure people engage with it. We also need to be ruthless about switching off channels we no longer require or whose purpose has changed.
- Transform the role of the Inbox. I think it highly unlikely that today’s workforce will abandon the Inbox as the portal supreme although their offspring might. So instead of looking at alternatives to it, what about seeking to change its role from repository (where my information is stored) to navigator (the compass which directs me to the information and interaction I want).
It’s not an exhaustive list and I’d love to extend it further. So let me know what you think and indeed, whether you agree!
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One of the pertinent comments made in response to the (in my opinion – poor) article in The Times was that email was not dead, but also that Twitter, Facebook et al were not to be seen as the all new pervasive methods of communicating. Moreover, consolidated communications would be seen as the way to talk, pass information and discuss topics in a portal that obfuscates the background methods of transmitting the data.
IM, twitter and texting are very prevalent – and certainly ubiquitous in the under 25’s – but they will only be used as additional tools to complement email – especially in the business world. The concept of a presence indicator – the main draw in many IM solutions – soon becomes more of a burden than a blessing as more and more people hide/busy/offline their status to prevent a plethora of inbound IMs requiring supposedly immediate response. What is perceived as urgent by one person is often seen as tedious & irrelevant by another. Email allows the recipient to make that choice of when (and if) to respond. People may complain about receiving 200 emails a day, but conversely find it easier to deal with the synchronous flow of an inbox rather than hold 8 concurrent IM conversations.
As business user’s workloads increase, email is seen as a workflow device even though it is poorly designed for that task. The reason people will email across a desk for an answer to a question is not because they do not want to talk or interact, it’s because they want a record of the conversation. Accuracy is increasingly important and users want to adopt a CYA approach in case an error is spotted.
Consolidation is key, however it needs to be delivered in a way that is simple and intuitive to use, easy to search (very important) and multi platform – and if you want the kidz to keep using it – cheap.
@Richard – Like your point about consolidation and search, but your (I think very accurate) observation that email is regularly used as a workflow tool makes me wonder. Once you start surfacing communication from many channels in a single interface, do we risk losing whatever aspect it was that made each channel useful in the first place?
I also think Sathnam Sanghera’s overlooked a critical assumption in his thinking: that one always communicates with people one already knows. One of email’s characteristics is that it doesn’t ask the sender and recipient to be anything more than that. Emailing a stranger does not require joining a network or making a declaration of connectivity. It’s also massively decentralised and not controlled by any company. The proliferation of spam (commercial and internal) might suggest this is a weakness, and heavy users of social messaging services certainly cite the (relative) lack of spam as a major draw. Still, they’re talking to people they already know, or are perhaps a degree or two of separation away. That is by no means the totality of person-to-person communication (certainly in the business space), so I think email will continue to play a role for good long while.