Get rid of email?

Anyone who doesn't use email on a daily basis, whether for work or personal, is probably an anomaly in today's era. If you're like most employees in the business world, the majority of your day is probably spent answering emails. 

Case in point: I can leave my desk to attend a meeting for 45 minutes, and come back with nearly 100 emails in my inbox. While this is a bit extreme, it just shows how email can take up a large chunk of your day. 

I recently stumbled on an article with a comment that caught my eye: "Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time-killer in the modern workplace." 

According to the same article, "The average business user wades through 114 emails a day, which works out to 41,610 messages a year (or one email every 12.6 minutes of your life)." 

So what if we got rid of e-mail in the workplace? We would certainly free up more time to work on important objectives like business development, employee relations, etc. But how would we communicate without email? 

In 2011, the CEO of a large, multinational French IT company banned email in his organization, and although it was met with much criticism, his new policy decreased message volume by 20 percent, which freed up some time for the employees. 

The author of this article suggests creating more of a social conversation in your organization, and moving away from traditional email. His suggestion: "Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast--with a click--to the world. 'Conversations' isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And it’s worked for us and 5 million clients." 

While I am not sure I agree completely with his suggestions, I do think he has a point. There must be a way we can eliminate the black hole that is our inbox, and come up with a faster, more efficient way of communicating. 

Face Time (and I don't mean on the iPad!)

I stumbled on one of Sir Richard Branson's blog posts this morning about how Virgin is changing the way we do banking and I found it quite interesting. 

According to Google, online banking was introduced in the 1990's (although I personally can't remember banking online that early!) and slowly over the years I've noticed that banks are trying to send everyone online and away from the branches. 

I do most of my banking online but I do still enjoy making a trip to my branch and talking with the tellers. Every Saturday, the Butterfield branch at Governor's Square has coffee and brownies set out and you can often run into everyone you know - it's practically social hour! At my branch back home, there was always one particular teller whom I really enjoyed chatting with as she was always so cheerful and could brighten your day. 

But every time I would visit the branch, they would ask me why I didn't just go online to make my transaction, and I've often wondered why they are trying to get rid of the personal interaction all together. 

In today's world, we can do pretty much everything online and virtually. Of course, this has allowed us to improve the way we do things and has made us more efficient (to an extent). But do we really want to remove ALL personal interaction?? 

I have visions of us all sitting in a room one day not speaking to each other at all but instead IM'ing the person across the table from you (I am aware that this is already happening - while eating at a restaurant in NYC recently I observed a married couple at the table beside me, both not saying a word to each other but instead typing and swiping away at their iPhones). What a lonely world that will be! 

Are we really evolving or are we actually moving in the wrong direction?  

Does social media have a positive impact on business performance?

The majority of businesses believe that ‘employee voice’ has a positive impact on engagement and performance, according to new research.
But employers, particularly larger organisations remain wary about workers using social media to express opinions.
A recent article in People Management explores this in more detail, please click here to read more.

“Employee voice is increasingly important in the modern workplace… it is one of the enablers of employee engagement and can significantly impact business performance,” said the report. “But employee voice remains both little understood as a concept and under-utilised in the world of work.”

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How to make social media worthwhile

In the days before email, we used to talk with one another. It strikes me that a lot of people have largely forgotten how to do that, and if we are not careful I think social media will continue that forgetfulness.

According to a recent article by the CIPD, Doug Shaw discussed this point in great detail and looked at three things to make your workplace more open and trustworthy;

Decentralisation
It’s not enough for businesses to talk about openness and trust, for it to occur, giving people access to the like of Facebook and Twitter is one thing, but giving them the environment where it’s OK to respond on behalf of the company is essential; otherwise all you do is create blockages in the system. A benefit of social media is speedy responsiveness.

Vulnerability
People make mistakes, and very often the open systems of social media highlight those mistakes, and quickly. Having the confidence to display your vulnerability is extremely powerful in creating an environment where it’s OK to make mistakes and learn from them.

Conversation
In the days before email we used to talk with one another. There is no tone in online converstaion, you can only pick that up in normal conversations.  Remember having a face to face conversation with someone in the same physical space? You get to see the body language, eye contact, smiles, anger, all these things manifest themselves and add to the richness of the experience.

So there you have it – three things that make a real difference in helping an organisation be more responsive and more engaging, for employees, customers and other stakeholders too.

What are your thoughts on how social media has affected or enhanced your organisation?

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