A Brave Email Experiment
Imagine what could happen in your company, if your President, CEO, or otherwise-titled Top Dog, conducted this experiment for as little as a week’s time;
The Email Experiment
Please use email only when absolutely necessary, to respond to those who initiate conversations with you via email.
However, those who initiate those email conversations with you should only be customers, guests and prospects, vendors and suppliers, because;
In our own company, we are going to talk to each other again.
No emails may be sent to anyone within the same building as you. Instead, you must visit them.
The only emails which may be sent to another in our own company in a different location, are those to offer a choice of times for a telephone conversation (and their reply will be to call you at one of those times), or to attach a file you must collaborate on.
Conversations will only be held by voice.
Here’s the rub: Only the Top Dog knows it’s an experiment. Everyone else is told that this is the way it will be from now on.
Would you have chaos, or conversation?
If your answer is chaos, I am guessing your work culture is less than healthy.
If your answer is chaos, is that what happens when your email servers go down? Does everything simply stop until you are online again?
After that week’s experiment, would you go back to your old habits again? Would you have to?
Methinks miraculous things could happen if we stop the one-way deluge of email and start talking to each other again.
[There’s a Long Version of this article on Talking Story today.]
Article Reference:
On the Kūlia i ka nu‘u warpath: The Email Enemy
Rosa Say is the author of Managing with Aloha, Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business, ManagingWithAlohaOnline and the Talking Story blog. She is also the founder and head coach of Say Leadership Coaching, a company dedicated to bringing nobility to the working arts of management and leadership. During the month of March, she has been on a warpath to banish mediocrity.
Rosa’s Previous Thursday Column was: Everyday Performance Reviews.
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Comments
chrispian says on March 24th, 2006 at 1:42 am
Clearly this isn’t relevant to people who actually work with other people. At my old job there were 30-40 people in one area, in cubes. We could just yell over the cube anytime and “talk” instead of email. You know what, people did. All the time. Meetings are disruptive and constantly coming to talk to me keeps me from being prodcutive. Email shouldn’t be used as “instant” communication, but instead as a way to get a message to someone so they can process it on their time, on their schedule how they work.
I agree that email is a problem, but talking to people is at as bad or worse. I’m not saying don’t interact. I’m saying it needs to be controlled, just like email. Otherwise both are chaos. I get interrrupted 20-30 times a day with only 3 other people in the office now. I can’t imagine how bad that would get without email because they also send dozens of emails.
Worst guy to work with though? The guy who sends you an email and then walks over as soon as he hits send to make sure you “got it”. Double whammy.
David says on March 24th, 2006 at 1:55 am
Aside from the noise problems in cubetown (which I used to have to deal with), it’s also completely impractical for any environment where people, you know, work. I’m only in my office about half the time. Having to sychnronize communications would totally destroy productivity in my office. Well, no. Everybody would just send voice-mail instead of email.
Michael Leddy says on March 24th, 2006 at 4:03 am
I suppose that his suggestion might not work well if people are talking across cubicles, but it does highlight the ways in which e-mail can lead to a depersonalized, alienating workplace, in which e-mail weirdly substitutes for face-to-face communication.
A related problem: elaborate signature files on e-mails to people in the same workplace. To whom do these senders think they’re sending?!
Michael Leddy says on March 24th, 2006 at 4:06 am
Oops — THIS suggestion, not “his.”
John says on March 25th, 2006 at 3:03 am
If it’s an email to one person, then it would improve things, I tell myself off a lot for that and occasionally catch myself before I send the mail.
However, mails to multiple people, and mails to people difficult to get hold of, are a must, they do improve things.
jkeitch says on March 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am
This would of caused complete and udder chaos at my last job.
We had over 1200 employees in the4 same building with about 200 in the marketing/advetisign dept alone. The higher up you go, the more of your day is in meetings, some days are an 8 hour meeting. It’s almost impossible to keep in touch with certain people without using email. It was also about the only way to send files back and forth to certain depts. across two OSs and half a dozen servers.