No-email Fridays!?
Collaboration, Email, Exchange, Information Overload, Instant Messaging, Notes Domino April 10th, 2007Here 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?
- Is this a systemic problem of corporate culture?
- Is email being used as intended, or filling in for broken document management and/or transaction systems?
- Are complimentary technologies such as IM, wiki’s and intranet portals in place and being used?
- 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?
Technorati Tags: no email fridays, jay ellison, email abuse, email overload
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April 10th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Hi Stefan, I enjoyed this post. I was recently featured on the Today show (Weekend) about this same topic. All the points I made that are along the lines of what you’re saying got cut from the story. Your comments are so right on. Declaring no email Fridays is a band-aid approach when what they need is surgery.
When you get a moment, take a look at my 27 email pet peeves:
http://suiteminute.blogspot.com/2007/03/27-email-pet-peeves-that-tick-people.html
May 15th, 2007 at 6:06 am
Hello Stefan, Peggy
I thought you might like to know how we deal with email here in Australia. Our results show that folks need a technology solution which makes Outlook usable. ‘Training’ only doesn’t readily pay off because old habits die hard. If the solution DID lay in training alone the problem would have been solved a long time ago. No-one suffers the effects of email overload willingly.
Great Blog by the way.
Best wishes
Stephen Barnes
CEO, Orla
May 15th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I completely agree. User training is only effective when combined with enabling technologies and active enforcement.
Thanks for the feedback.