CRA Inc

25 Sep 03 @ 3:33 pm

The Ban Of Internal Email

As many of you probably read, John Caudwell, CEO of the UK phone retailer phones4u, recently banned the use of internal email across his company (from CNN.com: Firm bans e-mail at work ). Caudwell discovered that his employees were not solving customer problems as quickly as they once had and he attributed this deceleration to unnecessary email shackling employees to their computers.

Based on his informal research, Caudwell figured that his employees spent three hours per day on unnecessary email, which equated to $1.6 million per month. The majority of this email was not spam or personal—it was from inside the company and related to customer accounts. Rather than picking up the telephone or walking down the hall to ask a question, employees emailed each other and then had to wait at their computer for the response.

Now, is Caudwell’s reaction a bit extreme? Maybe. Do we all get caught up in this email game on a regular basis? Probably. Does it cost us time away from your internal clients, external clients, or direct reports? Surely. So, extreme? Maybe. But definitely not unreasonable when you think of the time we all spend crafting and proof reading email and waiting for responses to our strategically developed (and often unread) messages (when we could get a quick answer by standing up or lifting the telephone receiver).

We see this situation almost everywhere we go, and many of our clients surely smiled when they read about Caudwell’s reactions…the scenario and Caudwell’s retort confirm two pieces of our advice perfectly…

First, the situation and its associated problems exhibit perfectly the notion of media richness. As we’ve posted in the past, it is important to be thoughtful about the medium with which you send any message. Why? Because all media vary according to their richness (or the opportunities they afford for feedback and their capacity for conveying meaning). Face-to-face and voice-to-voice are two of the most rich mediums and email, while more rich than anonymous letters, are a bit on the lean side. So when looking for answers to questions or feedback on an idea, it is important to communicate via a rich medium.

Second (and also as we’ve mentioned before, leaders’ decisions send more powerful messages to an organization than any messages transmitted through formal communications. So when designing communication strategies, we doggedly advise our clients to shamelessly leverage decisions that support their strategy if it’s one they truly want their employees to believe. phones4u claims they are customer focused in everything they do (it’s on their website and in all statements from Caudwell). After this decision, I now truly believe them if I am an employee or customer of phones4u.

posted in category(s): Emerging Case Studies