Here is another take on “making email boring”- how corporate America is trying to deal with email overload. Some of you may have seen this story on ABC last Saturday.

U.S. Cellular CEO Jay Ellison is banning email on Fridays. Ironically, Ellison announced the measure in an email to all 5,500 employees:

“Get out to meet your teams face-to-face. Pick up the phone and give someone a call. … I look forward to not hearing from any of you, but stop by as often as you like.”

Is a ban on email one day a week going to fix the problem? Probably not for very long, but it does send a strong signal to employees to change their communication habits. To affect long term change, companies must see beyond a short-term fix and look first at the root cause of the problem:

Why is corporate email traffic getting out of hand?

  1. Is this a systemic problem of corporate culture?
  2. Is email being used as intended, or filling in for broken document management and/or transaction systems?
  3. Are complimentary technologies such as IM, wiki’s and intranet portals in place and being used?
  4. Who are the top (ab)users of the mail system and what are these users doing?

Once the extent and cause of the problem is understood, better long term solutions can be implemented. These typically consist of both employee education and technology improvements. User training, not only on proper email use, but also on other available technologies, is critical. In many cases the users may not even know about the tools available to them, such as corporate IM (e.g. Sametime, LCS) and intranet documents sharing systems (e.g. Sharepoint, QuickPlace). Instead they default to the “comforts” of their inbox.

Btw, other companies have tried this before. I wonder if Veritas (now part of Symantec) is still observing email free Fridays?

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