IT employees know how much users depend on email. But here’s one company that actually plans to keep its employees away from that ubiquitous communication tool in order to free up IT resources and employee time.
Atos Origin, an international IT services provider based in France, plans to completely ban internal email within the next two years.
The reason: The volume of email being sent and read by Atos employees is “unsustainable,” according to CEO Thierry Breton. Employees receive an average of 200 messages a day, and Breton estimates that only about 10% of them are actually useful, according to a recent CNN story.
That’s a lot of email that must be read, searched through and stored on the company’s servers.
There are much better and more efficient options for employees to communicate with each other, Breton said, such as social media, instant messaging, document sharing, or old-fashioned phone calls and face-to-face conversation.
Does banning email sound like a crazy idea? While it’s unlikely that many businesses will follow Atos’s lead, shunning email may actually be a cutting-edge tech idea — some recent surveys have found email is becoming less popular among younger generations, and IT execs are seeing the benefits of more real-time communication tools.
What do you think — how would your organization handle a ban on internal emails? Let us know in the comments section below.