Look at your e-mail in-box. How many e-mails do you have sitting there, right now, unread? Most likely a bunch, as e-mail communication proves to be one of the fastest ways coworkers can communicate, besides picking up the phone and making a call. But what happens if your company just decides to ban all e-mail communication? One would think the effects would be devastating, but for one company in France, they banned e-mails 3 years ago and haven’t looked back!
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According to the Harvard Business Review, author David Burkus writes that Thierry Breton, CEO of the France-based information technology services firm, Atos Origin, has banned all e-mail communications within the company. Breton, himself, stopped using e-mail several years before banning it across the entire company because he claims it “hampered his productivity.”
He noticed his employees seemed to be constantly distracted by the pinging of messages flowing into their in-boxes, so in 2011, he set forth a “zero-e-mail” initiative. A public statement on Atos’s website says, “We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives.” The statement goes on to say, “We are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”
But how do they communicate, you ask? Simple—they didn’t ban electronic communications altogether; instead, they built a social networking platform for the entire company. Burkus reports that the network was organized “around 7,500 open communities representing the various projects that required collaboration … conversations are not automatically interrupting employees by pinging their inbox. Instead, employees can choose to enter the discussion on their terms and their schedule.”
How has the company fared so far? Well, it’s not entirely 100 percent e-mail-free, but it’s getting there! Burkus adds, “The company has reduced overall e-mail by 60 percent, going from an average of 100 e-mail messages per week per employee to less than 40. Atos’s operating margin increased from 6.5 percent to 7.5 percent in 2013, earnings per share rose by more than 50 percent, and administrative costs declined from 13 percent to 10 percent.” If you’re finding that your company is being inundated by e-mails, maybe a prohibition-style ban on e-mail communication is right up your alley!