The company that banned internal email and watched productivity go up

If, like me, you read the title of this blog and think “well, duh” then you might find this BBC Radio 4 interview amusing (starts at 52:30). It features Paddy O’Connell interviewing the team at Bournemouth-based tech firm Rarely Impossible where internal email has been banned. Employees comment on how instead of spending time chasing conversations on email or email politics, they’re able to speak to each other in person and get the information they need immediately or — can you imagine?!— respond to clients more quickly. “Email had become a task list rather than a communication tool,” Managing Director Lee Mallon explained.

When Paddy asks to see Lee’s inbox, he’s shocked to find only two emails (Paddy, on the other hand, has 1,253). Rarely Impossible employees use Slack for internal communications with different channels for different projects. As a distributed team who can work whenever and wherever they like, they also have a team channel where people let each other know their movements. Paddy concludes the interview with this great soundbite:

“…email in many offices has become a socially transmitted disease…and the question, “When was the last essential email you received?” becomes increasingly difficult to answer.”

(Ironically, back in the studio Eddie Mair invites listeners to email in their thoughts and comments with the word ‘office’ in the subject so they can find them.)

I’m always on the look out for new #noemail victory stories to share. One statistic I stumbled across last year is this: the average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail — that’s roughly 13 hours! Email was never designed for the volume of messages we now exchange and receive. The very technology that was designed to enable us is now drowning us.

Here’s why I hate email. Firstly, it’s a focus and energy drainer. Tony Schwartz writes about the ‘Pavlovian ping’ of the ‘new email’ notification. Our brains are wired to find this irresistible and yet the new message is almost never important or exciting. But once our flow is interrupted, studies tells us it can take up to 25 minutes to get our focus back.

The second reason I hate email is that it breeds nasty behaviour like copying in someone’s boss in the hopes it’ll give a useless person a kick up the arse or having to constantly copy in your manager because they have control issues. Matthew Lieberman discovered in his book ‘Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect’ that our brain receives information about physical pain and social pain in the same way, so when someone pulls a dick move on email (however unintentional), it’s like being jabbed in the face with a biro. It’s often not enough to really hurt you, but consider how many email jabs you get in the space of a day if you work for a global corporation, for example? Just think how frequently people are being emotionally hijacked in offices by email alone! When we feel threatened, our pre-frontal cortex shuts down which massively impairs our ability to think rationally, solve problems or be creative. So email both robs us of focus and hijacks our rational brains.

Email also breeds stupid behaviour — see this brilliant comic by The Oatmeal.

Finally, it’s just inefficient. What’s more effective?

A) I have a company-specific question and I don’t know who has the answer. I’ll email four people who I think might have the answer. Maybe someone knows, maybe they don’t. If I’m lucky, they might know someone who knows the answer. Given how many emails they have competing for their attention, it’s likely they won’t even respond.

B) I ask the question on Slack or Yammer (or whatever you’re using internally) and I get several answers from people including someone I would never have thought to ask. And now everyone can see both my question and the answers so next time someone has that query, the legwork’s already been done. Boom.

So let’s stop the spread of the socially transmitted disease that is email and choose instead technologies that are re-humanising work and giving us back our time.

Caveat: obviously technology is only as good as how we use it. I’m aware that people have written articles recently about how time consuming Slack can be with various notifications, for example. All of these tools require a degree of personalised fine tuning and life hacking but I’d argue that almost anything is better than email because of the unproductive and unhealthy habits it breeds.