Posts Tagged 'email'

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Posted on February 15th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years. More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms. I’ve.. Read more

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Posted on February 10th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails. I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they.. Read more

Slower or faster? Email vs. Voice

Posted on February 4th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled… The.. Read more

Six steps to elicit a response to your emails

Posted on December 20th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

I’ve discussed the harmful effects of Online silence, the phenomenon where you send email and no reply arrives for days. Since this phenomenon persists, driven by the endless flood of incoming messages, here are some tactics to apply when you run into it. Be proactive. Write your emails to encourage a response – short, to the point, and with clearly marked action items. Make the subject reflect the urgency and the required response: “Can you send me the financial summary by the Tuesday staff meeting?”, not “Staff”. If the mail is fast to read and process, the response is far.. Read more

Why email is more stressful than paper mail

Posted on December 6th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was trying to get my email Inbox down to zero for the weekend, and though I was making good progress, I felt a mounting sense of stress. Realizing this, I stopped to introspect: why stress? Here I was, going down the list of incoming messages, deleting the useless ones and addressing the more important stuff, and generally doing a good job. Why stress, rather than a feeling of accomplishment? So I examined more closely what I was doing in the process, and I realized that many of the emails were carrying “gifts” of additional activities. One message might direct.. Read more

The Offense system of Email Overload

Posted on November 24th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was delivering my Information Overload Jump Start workshop to a manager forum and we were discussing the reasons they were sending all those unnecessary messages to each other, when one of the participants made a perceptive comment: “We use”, she said, “the Offense System of addressing email!” What she meant, she elaborated, was that when in doubt you simply copied anyone in the organization who might be offended if you left them out. And since this is the path of caution, you bet they were sending to everybody and his brother – simply to be on the safe side!.. Read more

Is the brevity of SMS language compromising our emails?

Posted on September 12th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

An interesting observation in a client meeting: we were discussing the contribution of language gaps in a global company to email overload, and one participant pointed out that these days many younger employees use the super-abbreviated “SMS language” in their emails, leading to more misunderstood messages than in the past. Writing brief emails is not a new device; I notice it particularly among senior executives, who respond in one-liners and even in ALL CAPS to maintain communication despite the overload. These, however, tend to be older people and they write these brief emails in English. For instance, a baby boomer.. Read more

Five tactics to prevent your email from reaching the wrong eyes

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

In a previous post we saw that it’s all too easy for your email to find its way to people you hadn’t meant it for. So, what can you do when sending a sensitive message, to prevent such embarrassment (or worse)? Here are some tactics to consider: You can put in the message an explicit plea for discretion, such as “For your eyes only” or “DO NOT FORWARD”. You can also put “[Private]” in the subject, though that may draw the attention of hackers and people passing by an unlocked PC in the recipient’s absence. But of course, this is.. Read more

Speed vs. Thought in email communications

Posted on August 23rd, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Given that knowledge workers receive many more emails daily than they can possibly process, it is small wonder that some emails never get a response (the phenomenon called Online Silence, which I’ve discussed before). Indeed, the research shows that if a message isn’t replied to in a day or so, it is likely never to be answered. There is, however, an interesting exception: messages that require an answer but also necessitate thought. A great example are requests for LinkedIn endorsements (also known as recommendations). The way it works, in my experience, is this: Jack asks his LinkedIn contact, Jill, to.. Read more

Six ways your email can reach the wrong eyes

Posted on August 18th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

One mistake people often make is assuming the emails they send are private. All hell can break lose when an email is disclosed to unintended parties. There are many ways this can happen to a message (and Murphy’s laws will ensure it does, at the worst possible time). For instance: The recipient might forward it inappropriately. This is probably the most common occurrence. Sometimes it’s an act of pure idiocy, as when you send someone a personal comment about X and before you know it they send it to X or his colleagues. But often it’s indirect: the recipient forwards.. Read more