

Email banned at 75,000-employee company - ojosilva
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/11/tech-company-implements-employee-zero-email-policy/

======
drewcrawford
Lots of the comments here are missing the point. In my experience at enormous
companies (that have had e-mail policies, in varying degrees, like this one),
they have zero to do with productivity and have everything to do with the
various laws, rules, and regulations surrounding data retention of e-mail.

To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly
traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he
does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about
discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an
unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that
deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to
much less legal liability.

~~~
saryant
Forgive my ignorance, but if a company exists in an industry with mandated
data retention/logging, wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email?
In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged
they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.

Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to
email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.

~~~
VladRussian
>wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the
law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either
way in your scenario.

then how about oral "instant messaging"?

------
tzs
I don't understand why usenet-like newsgroups have not caught on for internal
company communication. A large part of typical internal email is sent to
multiple recipients, such as everyone working on a project. A typical email
client makes a total hash of this as people break off into side discussions of
various parts of the various emails. Messages are either giant because people
quote the entire previous thread, or they are confusing to anyone who comes in
late if the entire thread is not quoted.

With a newsgroup, you've got a nice threaded discussion. If some people start
discussing something you aren't interested in, it is easy to skip those
messages. If someone comes in late, they can see the past messages.

If I were setting up the internal communications for a company, I'd consider
newsgroups, with a newsgroup per project and a newsgroup per department, as
the main non-private method for project and department discussion. IM would be
used for short things that you want a quick response on. Email would be used
for one on one things that are not appropriate for the newsgroups and too long
or not urgent enough for IM. Probably have a wiki or something like that for
evolving documentation.

~~~
adestefan
I worked at a rather large company that did this and the newsgroups turned
into total chaos. Posting to the newsgroup didn't have the same social stigma
attached as sending a mass email or hitting "reply to all." This led to people
posting rants, the latest chain messages, and some pretty off color things. Of
course, management went ape over this and decided to just scrap the entire
system instead of fixing the cultural problems.

~~~
absconditus
At the very least it seems like the system should have been left in place to
collect the noise and then most people could just ignore it.

------
shaggyfrog
"That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months,
forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via
instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface."

So, basically, let's eliminate the form of electronic communication that has
some semblance of permanency (e-mail) and replace it with an ephemeral one
(Facebook-style chat) and one that doesn't lend well to archiving, indexing
and search (IM).

E-mail is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used wisely, or it can be used
poorly. If it's being used poorly, why isn't the solution to fix how people
are using it? And how the heck is _18% of the e-mail that reaches users spam_?
Do they not use filters?

~~~
rdouble
Why would it be hard to archive and index chats or IMs? My Facebook chats and
IMs are already archived on Facebook. I even have a local archive in my iChat
folder. Seems like that problem has been solved.

The article just means his company is shifting to something like Jive instead
of Exchange.

Maintaining an internal mail system is a gigantic headache for many reasons.
You have continual spam and phishing attacks from the outside as well as
internal users using their email as a document repository. Closing off the
external threat and using purpose built software for document exchange and
internal communication is totally sensible.

~~~
shaggyfrog
There are all kinds of risks in letting Facebook handle the archiving of a
company's internal communication, their bad track record with matters of data
privacy notwithstanding.

~~~
brown9-2
the article says "Facebook-style", not "Facebook".

~~~
shaggyfrog
The post I'm replying to is specifically talking about saving Facebook chats.

------
xal
Let's hope they are collaborating with some real researches to measure the
impact of this. It's definitely a super interesting and plausible experiment.

I have a love/hate relationship with email. It's definitely good in theory,
but in reality there are hundreds of problems with it.

One example: I get hundreds of CC'd emails a day ( I'm CEO ) and people assume
that I read them and memorize them. Sure, it's a super low overhead way for
other people to update me on all sorts of progress. However, I don't need that
kind of visibility. I train people to make decisions autonomously and give me
weekly updates. I can do that because I'm everyone's boss and I'm still
drowning under the flood of well meaning CCs. I'm sure it's worse for most.

------
dlsspy
"Ban" is probably not the right action, but I'd definitely like some action
taken around my office.

I've proposed some form of email tax by recipient. Like, you get 100
recipients per day free or something. Slow down and use them well. The time
you try to save by being vague and sending out garbage is time that all your
recipients spend trying to figure out what you want from them and whether it's
more important than whatever else they're doing.

I see lots of emails floating around where I have to respond, "Please file a
bug and move the conversation there before all of this is lost." Then you get
the, "I just got a new cat!" email sent to all with hundreds of, "yay!"
responses. I'm glad you got a new cat. I'd be happy to "like" your post on
yammer. I'm not happy to get an email every time someone else wants to
congratulate you on your cat acquisition.

I build up a lot of email debt and every once in a while I manage to get rid
of some things. Part of it is tooling (I'd like a sort of "shelf life" for
email in my mail reader), but part of it is just how easy it is for humans to
do the one thing that amplifies into a time sink for everyone else.

------
ed209
I agree that email is a tool and that the way it's used is most of the battle.
But I feel, more and more these days, that email is a heavy chain around my
neck throughout the day.

Actually, email is really only a delivery method, just as facebook message or
skype IM is just a delivery method. I think the solution to this problem is
what the client does on receiving that message (or probably what my mail
server does).

If my boss sends me a job he wants doing, then that message should go into a
to-do bucket, with a due date and reminders. If that message is telling me
that a domain name was auto-renewed for £x, it should ping my online accounts
software and reconcile it with the bank transaction.

Doing this would eliminate the need for me to have an inbox, all of these
things would go somewhere useful and actionable.

Stopping emails will not stop people sending me blocks of text that I need to
read and process.

------
jrockway
The biggest problem with email is how much information is in private emails
instead of public forums. If I want to learn something internal to my company,
I have to spend days investigating who to ask, then go to a bunch of
conference calls or meetings, only to receive a 700-forwards-deep piece of
documentation from someone who was laid off decades ago. In the real world, I
type my question into Google and have an answer in seconds.

The problem is that most people at big companies suck massively at
communication, and that that lack of skill wastes thousands of hours of
valuable programmer time. The only way I can have a really productive day at
work is to stay home, keep my email closed, and not work on systems that
depend on any shared infrastructure. No wonder our market cap is less than our
assets :)

------
makecheck
Sounds a little like this: "people could choke, better ban eating".

------
pfarrell
My company has great spam filters. Our problem is the chatter, reply-to-all,
and +{some list with 300 people} behaviors.

Two months ago, I implemented the nuclear rule on my inbox. \- if my email is
not in to or cc \- if the mail isn't sent to whitelisted lists \- if body
doesn't contain certAin keywords -> the mail is stored in a "not sent to me"
folder which I check less and less frequently. Merlin Mann definitely inspired
this experiment.

It's been working great. I've been more productive and have missed very
little.

------
kylec
If they only want to have employees contact each other, why not restrict the
email to internal use only? Have the server block any email not sent by
another employee or being sent to a non-employee. Removing it altogether and
requiring communication by IM does not scale - can you imagine going on
vacation and coming back to hundreds of IMs?

~~~
dlsspy
A very large percentage of my day is spent reading emails from other employees
in my company to figure out if there's anything I should be doing with it.

If I'm on vacation, I'm not online to receive an IM. Anything important that
needs work from me would have instead been filed as a bug and can be assigned
to me on my return if it hasn't been fixed yet.

------
kleiba
My younger (and very productive) co-worker has his IM client running by
default and uses it to communicate with other (young) co-workers. Frankly, I
don't know how they do it. I would go mad - the constant notification popups
in the upper right corner kill my concentration. They're too distracting for
me. But then again, I'm probably just getting old.

A former co-worker at a different company had a policy that he would only
read/write email before noon each day. I think something like that may be a
better strategy than discarding email altogether company-wide. When you need
an answer right away, you could always use the phone. And for him at least
this did not result in people dropping by his office or his phone ringing all
the time.

~~~
icebraining
I'm 22 and I can't stand IM notifications either.

------
qthrul
Here's the thing... [1]

If you have a look back at how long the death of email has been predicted you
can go about as far back as the first email service created. Not everyone
adopted it.

If you want to go back to 2005 you might like the point of view of Stowe Boyd
<http://sto.ly/uCnRMs> regarding this article. Also, I've been on talks/panels
on the topic as far back as 2009 <http://bit.ly/9ENcpJ> and again in 2010
<http://bit.ly/bG7DVz> complete with a sad rendering of an inline Google Wave.

How do I feel now about email? Mixed.

What I do agree with is the notion of email as a lowest common denominator for
exchanging information has a lasting value. What I do not agree with is that
email is /enough/ for everyone.

Today, you have lots of choices in how you use email or elect to treat it (or
ignore it) so that only the most relevant things are presented to you. If you
are a company/corporation and you are planning to allow for employee
communication the effectiveness of any solution is far removed from just email
these days. If anything, we're generating more silos now than we ever have.

To the other comments here regarding Salesforce/Chatter, groupware, etc... I
get that -- in fact I use that -- but there are still TONS [2] of people that
steadfastly maintain that email is the only thing that lets them use their
iPhone or Crackberry without jumping through the hoops of corporate VPNs or
other hoop jumping exercises to reach a web groupware app that just
fundamentally FAILED to ever take into consideration the mobile experience.

[1] Yay disclosure! <http://fudge.org/disclosure/> [2] totally scientific...
yes, you can quote that

------
ggr
There is also a risk that people start working around the policy by using
webmail such like gmail in order to patch the communication problem. Which
could make the problem even worst.

------
absconditus
This seems like treating a symptom and not the problem.

------
cwilson
I'm surprised at the lack of comments about Yammer. I used to think it would
be a product I'd NEVER use, but for a recent year long project I used it with
a team of around 20 others. The result was pretty awesome. Emails were rarely
sent/received, at least internally, and this was not a policy (the use of
Yammer over email just naturally happened). When email WAS appropriate
(private discussions usually, or outside partners), it was of course used, but
this was only around 10% of the time. Everything else was in Yammer, Campfire,
or IM, and it was SO much better.

My favorite aspect of this was the ability to include someones username in a
post (much like on Facebook, via @username). This would actually ping them to
let them know their attention was required, otherwise you can keep up to date
with Yammer threads at your own pace. This is not the case with email.

~~~
njharman
We have yammer at work. It's a total waste of a time sink.

Maybe I'm just old, but I much, much, much prefer stored systems like email
which I can ignore when I need, keeps nice queue of what I've received/read,
has folders/filtering/taging/search, ability to archive/save important
messages.

Vs IM/Twitter/IRC constant stream systems. Which constantly distract me with
msgs I care little about and when I ignore them it's easy to miss and hard to
discover I missed something important.

------
cs702
Instant messaging is NOT a good substitute for email, because it requires that
everyone be simultaneously available over an always-on Internet connection.
Email in contrast enables asynchronous communication over unreliable Internet
connections.

Wiki-style or Facebook-style application might SEEM better alternatives to
email, but as soon as most people in the company start using these
applications instead of email, guess what? All those superfluous, time-wasting
messages that were clogging up the email system will start clogging up the new
applications. It's human nature.

A much better approach IMO would be to transition away from old-fashioned
corporate email applications like OutLook/Exchange to newer ones (like Gmail)
that make employees more productive/efficient.

------
mprovost
Here's my test of whether a message should be sent via email: "Can I reply to
it?" If the answer is no then it probably shouldn't be in email. Think about
all of the do-not-reply@ messages that come in that are notifying you of
something happening in some other system. email is for communication but too
often is just used for broadcasting one way messages. If I had an easy way of
filtering out these messages I could easily reduce my inbox by 90% - down to
things sent by humans that I need to respond to. Everything else could go into
some notification feed, the problem is that there's no standard protocol for
that so everything ends up in your inbox.

------
nradov
How silly. Employees will continue using e-mail to communicate with each
other, except now they're going to use personal Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo
accounts to do it.

------
dangerboysteve
While idiotic, his points have some merit. I'm known to crucify people that
cc/bcc me as part of their "cover your ass" cc/bcc corporate email chains. I
also found out early in life that 1 phone call can replace 10 email exchanges
between two parties.

Whatever the fallout, it will make for an interesting experiment. Personally I
think most of the staff will rely on personal email addresses :)

------
gerggerg
plus it'll cut down on that pesky paper trail of communication if engaging in
illegal acts.

------
j_baker
I wonder what this company will switch to when people are flooded with useless
IMs and useless messages on their Facebook-style messaging system?

------
fez
Why are employees getting 200 emails a day?

~~~
babebridou
A good part of that is episodic and accidental. There have been instances of
those "spammy" internal mails that just can't give up, such as a mail sent by
the HR to inform people that a car was left with lights on in the morning with
everyone (and not just the building) in cc instead of bcc or a contact group,
with endless streams of "reply all" asking to remove them from the mailing
list.

These happen, and in very large companies these issues can degenerate fast
unless your email admins are on their toes. Repeat the incident once a year
and it's fine. Repeat it once a month and you have a failing email system with
very visible streaks of 200+ mails/day.

------
jchrisa
They are still doing external email, so maybe this just adds disciple about
external vs internal communications.

------
JoeAltmaier
French competitiveness is not going to threaten American interests, which is
business as usual I guess.

------
nolanw
In other news, go.com is still a thing.

------
billpatrianakos
This is one of those ideas that sounds good at first but I think they may
rethink that.

Their points on the disadvantages of email are true and good but they may be
overlooking its good points and the downsides to using IM.

Spam can be quickly deleted. While its an annoyance there are Ways to curb the
amount received.

Lots of not useful email is sent but there are lots that _are_ useful.

The cool thing about email is that you can choose to ignore it easily and come
back later. When you substitute IM for email you're opening a can of worms
that can be worse. An IM is harder to ignore, people expect an instant
response and people will still use it for communicating less than useful info
still.

When you have an IM client open all the time you're going to have to context
switch more often than with email. With email you may get a little alert via
something like the Mail.app sound for new mail or a Growl type notification
but you know it can wait. With IM you're going to be switching over
immediately. Context switching kills productivity and this policy will make
matters worse.

The better solution would to implement a policy that stops people from sending
ridiculously not useful emails. They aren't solving the problem but just
putting it into a new context.

But then I'm reminded of a story here on HN from a day ago from the Atlantic
that talks about how folks like us can easily criticize but if we're so smart
why aren't we running that company. It may not apply here but it just popped
into my head.

~~~
sausagefeet
What immediately struck me is having two forms of communication rather than
one. I don't like that. The article mentions the company reduced it's email by
some percentage in the last six months as if that means something. I know I'm
more likely to send a stupid link to a coworker if I'm on chat vs company
email.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Yep, you're exactly right. It's like replacing long form time wasters with
short form time wasters. A context switch is a context switch whether it's
from productive work to email or from productive work to IM.

------
Canada
I applaud them. SMTP shouldn't reign forever.

~~~
nirvdrum
Their problems seem to be people-related, not technology related. Most
messages I receive on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, IRC, and any other
form of digital communication just aren't important. Email really isn't an
exception here in my experience.

