The Death of Corporate Email

Facebook founder had announced that the email is dead last year. Now a large Corporate CEO is actually trying to do it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos wants to prove to the world that a billion dollar multinational can be run without email. Atos is one of Europe’s largest IT companies with a turnover of more than 6 billion dollars and 80,000 employees around the world.

Breton has announced that after 2014 none of the employees will send an email to one another. Breton joined Atos as a CEO in 2008 having worked as the French finance minister earlier. He had stopped using emails a few years ago and wants everyone in his company to do the same.

He specified some of the reasons behind his decision to ban emails in the coming future.

1. Emails are used for instant communication which is not good.
2. Emails are used for data archiving which is not a good way or organizing.
3. Emails are used for global communication, process management which is bad.
4. Employees waste time in reading unnecessary emails as they are afraid they may miss out something important.
5. Emails encroach upon employee personal time as they keep on checking and answering emails at home and on their blackberries and smartphones which is not good for their productivity and well-being.
6. Employees may spend upto 15 to 20 hours per week reading and responding to emails which severely cuts down productive time. Of these only about 15% emails are really useful, rest are a waste of time and energy.

Atos is currently developing new social networking tools and adapting existing ones that will replace email. Breton wants to return to the old form of management and communication where you talk and communicate. He believes that personal communication will improve productivity and efficiency. The company is providing training to a number of employees who will then train others as part of the zero email programs. The company plans to stop all internal emails by 2014 even though external emails will still be there.

Let’s see how the experiment turns out and how other corporates adapt to this. This should be interesting as corporate email is one of the major tasks in a corporate environment. The results should be interesting and something to watch out for.