COMMUNICATION

Banning Internal Emails



Table of Contents

Introduction1

The need for the policy - benefits and issues1

Counter-productivity1

Information overload2

The frustration in employees3

Storage Challenge4

The flip side of the policy4

Alternatives to internal emails6

Email archiving6

Instant Messaging7

Collaboration Replacement8

Conclusion8

References10

Banning Internal Emails

Introduction

Each one of us who works in any domain sends and receives many emails in a single day. These email messages are essentially work related and they make the most important part of internal communication. This situation presents a dilemma for the employee who needs to manage his workload and at the same time is expected to read the flood of emails. Most of these emails are not even necessary or are truly meant for someone else and are sent to the other employees only for the sake of sharing the information. The founder of phones4u, John Cauldwell surprised people when he declared that the company will ban internal emails. Similar policy of abandoning internal emails has been adopted by many other technology companies in the UK who followed the bandwagon in an attempt to manage the internal email overload. The paper discusses the benefits and issues of this policy as well the various alternatives that are available for internal emails in the light of several organizations that have adopted this policy.

The need for the policy - benefits and issues

Emails are an indispensable part of internal communication in any organization. The quality of working condition is affected by the flood of redundant emails. Hence, there is a need for the abandonment of internal emails for the reasons discussed hereunder.

Counter-productivity

The employees in any organization spend too much of their time on reading emails. Most of these emails are from colleagues who send across messages only for the sake of sharing information. This means that the employees will be using their time which can be used productively for the benefit of the company in reading these emails. Hence, most of the emails are either unnecessary or unimportant. The management found that there was a need to understand and decide when does this pose a problem for the company and get counter-productive. Research on the time an average employee spends on reading emails revealed that on average an employee in a big organization spends about 15-20 hours of his time on reading emails, both at work and at home, on a weekly basis. The number of emails with each employee on an average basis was found to be 100. This means that if a person is thoroughly reading his emails, he is spending considerable amount of his limited time on job on these messages. In addition, this was deemed counter-productive as mere 15% of these emails were found relevant or useful for the employees.

Emails are very distracting in that when a user has his outlook or the internal communication software open, each time he receives an email he gets alerted on it. This alert is a distraction for the employee in that he reads it every time an alert pops up. In addition, between the time the employee reads the ...