An email study by the American Management Association finds employees spend 4 hours per day in their inbox. Keep finding the same number, otherwise I would discount the study because its sponsor is an email monitoring firm.
A UK company has responded in extreme according to LawMeme.
Provided they notify their employees of the practice, employers can legally monitor employees’ use of the company’s email system. One corporation is going a step beyond this measure, however, by eliminating email from the workplace altogether. News.com reports that Phones 4U, a mobile phone company, is imposing a no-email policy in the office. The regulation is predicated on efficiency concerns: the company’s CEO believes that slicing email out of the workplace will free up 3 hours of productivity per employee each day.
The mobile phone company hopes to save $1.6m per month of the time of its 2,500 employees.
But please — man cannot work by phone alone.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/groupware/story/0,10801,85174,00.html
So here is where the story gets wierder.
“There is now one briefing e-mail, which is circulated among all 2,500 staff every morning. Other than that, staff are being told they will have to communicate either face-to-face or by phone,” the spokesman said.
So that means people still have access to email and one can assume it can be used for personal communication. Oh, and another thing:
Customers will still be able to contact the company via e-mail and can expect a reply in kind. Phones 4u will also continue to contact some suppliers via e-mail, he said…
“It’s a very effective tool if used properly,” he told BBC Radio. “While I do believe that e-mail in general is the absolute cancer of British business, I only believe that because of the misuse of it.”
Now this sounds less extreme. It sounds like Policy and Policing, which couldn’t assume 100% effectiveness.
This is a far cry from an optimal solution, especially for users, but it highlights a Very Big Problem.
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