“I don’t use email anymore,” said the president of a multi-billion-dollar healthcare subsidiary to a group of his top 100 leaders. The refrain was witnessed by Insidedge EVP Dave Duschene at that company meeting.

“As the room went silent with surprise, the president conceded he was exaggerating to make a point: It’s far too easy these days to “communicate” by email, eliminating any opportunity for personal dialog or a personal connection,” writes Dave in his recent Intrack post “I don’t use email anymore”.

“The president wanted his top leaders to know that he expected them to play an active role as communicators around an aggressive new growth strategy that most acknowledged would ruffle more than a few employee feathers.”

One of the questions we ask employees in our many intranet surveys on behalf of clients is: “How do you prefer to receive distribution of company-wide information?”

The last survey of 700 employees revealed an all too similar result: only 26% prefer email to the intranet.

E-mail is perhaps the biggest killer application in recent technology history. We all need e-mail as part of our day-to-day work lives. However, many, many organizations have come to rely too heavily on e-mail. This over reliance has come at the expense of employee productivity and intellectual property.

A 2006 on e-mail suggests that e-mail has become a hindrance to many organizations. E-Mail Management: An Oxymoron? written by John Mancini, President of AIIM, the enterprise association on content management, states that a casual approach to e-mail management presents “significant risks” including

• major costs
• significant litigation
• a drag on key processes

The study culminates a great deal of analysis including a survey of more than 1000 e-mail managers (mostly IT managers and executives, and records and document management specialists).  Other study findings:

• Nearly half those respondents (44%) spend more than 30% of their work activity on e-mail related activity. 
• Only 25% of respondents have implemented an e-mail management strategy with most organizations leaving e-mail management up to individual employees (with little or no guidance)
• 23% of respondents in large size organizations (1000 employees or more) have had to turn over e-mail as part of a legal or internal investigation

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that anyone abandon email altogether,” says Duschene. “I’m just urging business leaders and the communicators who support them to try a little harder to be personal when it comes to communicating important news.”

“Hold your managers accountable. Arm them with information and ask them to meet with their teams. If they want to reinforce key messages by email, that’s fine – as long as they are making the effort at face-to-face communication as a rule and not an exception.”

There still needs to be a balance between email and intranet, but the overall refrain is almost universal: employees are sick of email and want less of it.