Is the
Email Dead?
CEO of IT
co Atos says emails wasteful way to interact
Email is dead, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared famously last November. Now, Thierry Breton, chief executive officer of Atos, one of Europe’s largest IT companies, wants to show the world how a €6-billion company can be run without internal emails. Breton recently vowed that after 2014 none of Atos’ 80,000 employees will ever send an email to another. Breton, 56, is a former French finance minister and took over as the Atos CEO in 2008. He stopped using emails a few years ago. “We use email for instant communication, which is a bad way to use emails,” he told ET during a recent visit to India. “We use email for archiving data, which is a bad way to do it. We use email to send global information to everyone — this is also a bad way to communicate; we use email to manage processes, which is a bad way to do it. We have many bad usages of email.” Breton plans to replace email with social networking tools, which he believes will be more efficient. Atos is now a year into what it calls the ‘Zero-email programme’. Breton says a few hundred Atos engineers are developing new social networking tools and adapting existing ones. There is so much enthusiasm for new communication tools that once people start using them they don’t want to go back to email. An average business user responds to over a 100 emails daily, recent studies have found. Atos estimates that many employees spend 15-20 hours every week just checking email, of which only 15% are really useful to them or customers. But employees still trawl through the rest for fear of ‘missing out on something’.
India
Inc Gives Thumbs Up
Breton’s call to kill email has found resonance with some India Inc CEOs. “I’ve contemplated shutting down email for 3-4 hours everyday in office so employees can get work done,” says Pramod Bhasin, vicechairman, Genpact, India’s largest BPO outfit. “There is no question there are a lot of useless emails and loss of productivity. When there’s an email on your BlackBerry you end up answering it even though it may be less important than what you are doing. It’s a habit.” Senior-level executives and CEOs are supposed to be great at managing their time, but they are vulnerable when it comes to email, he adds.
RPG Group-promoted Zensar Technologies has an email code of conduct which asks people not to ‘copy’ emails to anyone unless required. “We encourage people to push back if they feel they should not have been copied in an email,” says Ganesh Natarajan, vicechairman of Zensar and CII cochair, National Knowledge Council. “This brings down unproductive exchanges.”
Zensar is currently working on applying social media in the enterprise though Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter-like tools. But Natarajan says he doesn’t see these as replacement for email. “With good etiquette and discipline, email can be productive,” he adds.
Breton also said killing email will help companies go back to the basics of management. “I realised that our employees were managing too much through screens and did not manage enough by talking together,” he said. He recalled being shocked to see managers arrive in the morning and send out emails to say hello to everyone, even if they were sitting on the same floor.
Atos also found work emails were encroaching into employees’ personal time via laptops and smartphones. “We believe that when you are at home you should be at home with your family,” said Breton. In fact, well-being — not productivity gains — was the motivation for Atos’ ‘Zero-email programme’. Many India Inc executives are also struggling to cope with work-related email invading personal time. Unlike the US and Europe where the worklife demarcations are clear, work culture in India and most of Asia actively encourages a more flexible approach.
“This is a large change of management and mindset,” Breton said, referring to the move to dump email. “We are now in the process of training people and these people will have to train everyone.”
Breton’s call to kill email has found resonance with some India Inc CEOs. “I’ve contemplated shutting down email for 3-4 hours everyday in office so employees can get work done,” says Pramod Bhasin, vicechairman, Genpact, India’s largest BPO outfit. “There is no question there are a lot of useless emails and loss of productivity. When there’s an email on your BlackBerry you end up answering it even though it may be less important than what you are doing. It’s a habit.” Senior-level executives and CEOs are supposed to be great at managing their time, but they are vulnerable when it comes to email, he adds.
RPG Group-promoted Zensar Technologies has an email code of conduct which asks people not to ‘copy’ emails to anyone unless required. “We encourage people to push back if they feel they should not have been copied in an email,” says Ganesh Natarajan, vicechairman of Zensar and CII cochair, National Knowledge Council. “This brings down unproductive exchanges.”
Zensar is currently working on applying social media in the enterprise though Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter-like tools. But Natarajan says he doesn’t see these as replacement for email. “With good etiquette and discipline, email can be productive,” he adds.
Breton also said killing email will help companies go back to the basics of management. “I realised that our employees were managing too much through screens and did not manage enough by talking together,” he said. He recalled being shocked to see managers arrive in the morning and send out emails to say hello to everyone, even if they were sitting on the same floor.
Atos also found work emails were encroaching into employees’ personal time via laptops and smartphones. “We believe that when you are at home you should be at home with your family,” said Breton. In fact, well-being — not productivity gains — was the motivation for Atos’ ‘Zero-email programme’. Many India Inc executives are also struggling to cope with work-related email invading personal time. Unlike the US and Europe where the worklife demarcations are clear, work culture in India and most of Asia actively encourages a more flexible approach.
“This is a large change of management and mindset,” Breton said, referring to the move to dump email. “We are now in the process of training people and these people will have to train everyone.”
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N SHIVAPRIYA MUMBAI ETW 18J0112
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