When technology hits a wall
One thing about any mainstream technology: it can get so successful that it runs into a wall, and then another technology takes over. Take horse power: this worked great for millennia, but by the end of the 19th century there were hundreds of thousands of horses in New York City alone, and the manure they produced on the streets was becoming a huge problem. The issue was resolved only when the automobile was invented and took over (not, one may note, without creating its own environmental issues later on – and we’re waiting for the next solution to arrive).
And now email, the workhorse of business communication, seems to be running into a similar problem.
Disillusioned with email?
I was talking to a small business owner in the service sector, and she told me not to use email to contact her. She explained that she did not trust email to communicate with clients – they may not see the mail because of their overloaded state, and she herself has no time to check her inbox regularly due to her meeting load. Instead, she was increasingly relying on the telephone to run her client interactions.
Other people, I’m noticing, are relying on SMS as their primary communication mode; others still on WhatsApp.
What’s going on here? Are people becoming disillusioned with email?
When choice is not a good thing
Email is useful – indeed, it’s one of the best killer apps ever. But then, horses too are perhaps the loveliest of all domesticated animals; it’s just that the charm wears off when you have to wade through manure to get to them. Likewise with email, its usefulness begins to pale when the useful messages drown in an overload of irrelevant ones.
What’s interesting is that for years people used email and suffered the overload in silence. What alternative did they have? But now the march of technology is providing numerous alternatives, viable ones, and people are beginning to realize they have the freedom to choose what works best for their needs. Admittedly, a small business owner has more flexibility than a corporate employee; but even these can transfer part of their traffic to alternate channels, and they do.
The problem is that the choices employees make may not be in the best interest of a larger company. People making personal choices may do so with little regard to company policy, documentation requirements, or information security; and with the increasing number of handheld devices, and “Bring your own device” policies, it’s getting harder to control this trend. On top of which, email is still the Lingua Franca connecting the world. If some employees start deprecating it, going instead for local WhatsApp groups and the like, we get fragmentation and important interactions outside those groups may suffer.
What you should do about this
So what can you do, as a manager? I think you want to steer matters away from the threshold of disillusionment. You need to keep email use in your organization useful enough, sane enough, and pleasant enough that people will not give up on it in disgust. You need to ensure email remains viable.
This means you must eliminate the senseless misuse, overuse and abuse of email, retaining it for those uses where it is effective. At the same time you can encourage the introduction of alternate channels – phone, SMS, maybe even WhatsApp – for those uses where each of them excels. By optimizing the application of each tool, you can maximize communication effectiveness and keep the tools – email included – in their right places. And away from the wall!
