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Maximise your business synergy: Why we stopped using email.

Posted by Oliver Corrigan on Jul 21, 2014 8:30:00 AM
Oliver Corrigan
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Did you know that in 2012, 114.8 billion emails were sent every day? If this statistic isn’t staggering enough, a report compiled the same year revealed that workers, on average, spend 28% of their working day in their inboxes, sending, reading and responding to emails.

Needless to say, emails are an inherent part of modern businesses. It has long been perceived that pinging someone a quick email rather than picking up the phone or walking into another office to talk to them direct, makes a more efficient use of employees’ time.

Or does it? Would other forms of communication increase productivity within workforces? In short, should contemporary businesses get rid of emails?

Carrwood Park have started to think that there is another way and have been exploring different platforms to fill the void.

 

thumbs_downEmailing is a time killer!

According to Tim Ferris, the somewhat controversial author of the bestselling ‘The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join The new Rich,’ emailing is a time killer, so people should be brave and stop doing it. If, Ferris surmises, you are checking emails more than twice a day, you are going overboard.

So what’s the alternative to reaching for the mouse or the touchscreen and compiling a well-written, concise, typo-free email to a colleague?

business communication

The old-school talking approach

 
Ferris urges for there to be an internal email ban within companies, stating:
“It’s so much quicker to talk to the person on your team for a couple of minutes, rather than letting that conversation drag our over an afternoon as you both type, read and re-draft responses to the inevitable and pointlessly long email trail that happens otherwise.”
 
 
thumbs_up_circleTrade in emails for social networking communications
 
A report by the McKinsey Global Institute an International Data Corp. reiterates the ‘inefficiency’ of emails. The study found that, next to ‘role-specific tasks’, emails are the second most time-consuming activity in a company. The authors of the report claim that 20 – 30% of employees’ time could be freed up by introducing social networking communications into a business.
 
 

Case study: Thomas Knoll

Thomas Knoll is a Las Vegas-based entrepreneur who has been involved in community, marketing and custom development at LaunchRock, Zappos, UserVoice and Seesmic.

Knoll talks about how he banned email at his own company Primeloop and by doing so resolved a number of issues.

Okay, as Knoll admits, Primeloop didn’t actually ban emails as the company still has accounts, primarily for external communications. What it did do was to prohibit emails from being used in a number of ‘cardinal sins.’

 

thumbs_up_circleCloud-based solutions

Sharing information is one such email no-no, according to Knoll. Instead of sharing information with colleagues via email, Primeloop use a system called Hackpad. Hackpad, which has been acquired by Dropbox, enables users to document, store and get feedback on information that needs to be shared amongst everyone within a department or company. Employees can also indicate on a document whether they are looking for edits/review/feedback/input from anyone or whether the information stands as it is.

Emails, Knoll insists, should also not be used to passing on files.

“I won’t even get in to how silly it is to have duplicate and multiple versions of files floating around,” states Knoll.”

Instead, Primeloop uses Dropbox for all its files.

Hunter Walk, who in 2013 left nine years at Google to start a seed stage venture called Homebrew, talks about the death of CC and BCC. Describing the CC and BCC culture as a “political nightmare”, Hunter Walk advises that companies should get into a culture of sending emails when there’s an action required.

“’To’ should equal ‘Do’ (Do pay attention to this information. Do approve this request. Do follow through on this item). There are really very few people (or even worse, mailing lists of people) who need to be cc’ed on a message thread. They need to be told of a decision or summary. So finish the thread and then send it to the right recipients of a decision or summary. So finish the thread and end it to the right recipients with a tldr or other summary,” writes Hunter Walk. 

Check out our guest blog from appamondo about the benefits of working in the cloud.

 

thumbs_up_circleSkype and chat communication

Skype might have made communicating with a cousin in Australia or a Grandmother in Canada irrefutably easier, cheaper and more fun but the freemium voice-over-IP service software has also simplified business communications.

One benefit of Skype in business communications is that it provides a more cost-effective way of communicating. A survey in 2007, 95% of the 250 participating companies that used Skype said it helped them save on telecommunications.

What’s more, 80% of those surveyed said it also increased employee productivity. Away from a computer network, Skype’s file transfers, call forwarding, video conferencing, screen sharing and customer service tools, enable businesses to stay connected, both internally and externally.

 

thumbs_up_circleCRMs

Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) have taken off phenomenally in recent years. In fact, the CRM industry is now worth over $10 billion, with hundreds of CRM software competing.

The popularity of CRMs is primarily driven by the fact they provide businesses with an effective solution that drives sales productivity and marketing effectiveness through campaign management, business intelligence and social insights in the cloud, in-house or a combination of both.

Sending and receiving emails are a feature of CRMs. There are several advantages of sending emails on CRMs such as Microsoft Dynamics. One of the biggest benefits of CRM emails is that emails can be generated from campaigns, workflows and can also be tracked in the CRM.

With emails being able to be sent and received in CRM systems, we have to ask ourselves, why do we need to rely on traditional forms of emails?

The next time you’re about to fire an email to a colleague that’s sat ten feet away, ask yourself the logic in letting your fingers do the hard work when you could simply walk across the office and verbally communicate the message.

What are your thoughts on email culture within the business environment? Dead and buried? Or alive and kicking?

Is this the kind of business advice you want to hear? What kind of business advice in Leeds would you like to to read? Let us know!

 

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