Can we really dispense with email?

I was interested to read the following news in a post by Scott Gavin:

Atos, the largest IT services firm in Europe, is going to do away with internal e-mail. Atos CEO Thierry Breton says that only 15 percent of the 200 e-mails his staff receive on average are valuable, and that staff are wasting between 5 and 20 hours a week handling e-mail. Instead of e-mail, he wants staff to use instant messaging and other chat-like communications media.

The same story was picked up by Mark Bethelemy in Internal Communication – Beyond Repair?
There’s no doubt the employees at Atos are getting too many emails, as we all do. On the other hand, a fair number of these – 30 per day/week (it doesn’t state) – are, apparently, valuable. That’s a lot of communication that needs to be protected. While some sort of policy response is obviously called for if some of Atos’ employees are wasting half their working week handling email, banning this medium completely in favour of a synchronous alternative may be a little rash. Babies and bathwater come to mind.
First of all, can a synchronous communication channel, like instant messaging, do as good a job as email when it comes to handling all that valuable and necessary communication? Maybe, if the aim is to quickly resolve an issue or make an arrangement, but only if all of the parties that need to be involved are available at the same time. Communication through synchronous media is quick and relatively informal, but it is extremely intrusive. Before we forget, asynchronous media, such as email, have a lot going for them. You can (although many choose not to) control when and where you access and respond to emails. You don’t have to be open to email communication at all times, which means you have a fair chance of getting some concentrated work done. You can also take your time and provide a considered response to an email; there is no opportunity for reflection with instant messaging.
There are also practical advantages to asynchronous media, not least the fact that you get to keep a record of the communication. I have 100s of mailbox folders in my email application and these provide an absolutely invaluable way for me to stay organised and cut down on hard copies. If I worked within a large organisation and it had a really great online project management app, then that would be even better, but my clients and my collaborators are all over the place and I really do need to look after myself.
If I was CEO of Atos, I wouldn’t ban email, but I would seek to change the way it is used. First of all there’s the junk mail. Presumably they have spam filters to remove the obvious stuff, but all staff should be encouraged to divert what they don’t need to their own junk folders. Probably a much bigger issue is that far too many people are copying far too many others on emails which are of limited value to them. This can be stopped with a few simple policies: Only copy other employees in on an email when they might need to take action as a result or they simply must have a record of the communication; and certainly don’t copy attachments to people who are not required to read or store them.
Email has served us well for 30 years. While it is over used and other channels have emerged which do a better job of handling certain types of communication, there are plenty of circumstances in which email is the right choice. We just have to use it intelligently.

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