Luis Suarez (@elsua), curator of the Life without eMail G+ community, has posted a Vodcast co-presented with Claire Burge (@claireburge)
Here’s the full video:
30)
Here are my notes on the highlights of what Luis and Claire think is wrong with email:
“Email creates a dumber workforce” (3:02), because (4:02) the structure of email forces an obsession with emptying the inbox without action.
Email is a selfish tool (4:59) – centred around individual, not team or company goals (because you cannot see the impact of your email on the other person’s workload).
Email doesn’t help people focus on work (7:20) – it misdirects focus and attention. Stuff just flows in, recipient is expected to filter and sort (7:45). People don’t have time, so fall back to just emptying the inbox and treating their email as a task list. This leads to inefficiency through constant task-switching (8:10).
The inefficiencies are not about the technology, but about the human behaviours it engenders (8:58).
[more and more] people justify their workload by how many emails they process (9:22) – so if we take away the email you they have nothing to do. The implication (10:27) is that all the company knowledge, contacts, content and tasks are locked in email
Email gets used as a tool for covertly managing staff (10:45) – yes some interactions need to be confidential, but most aren’t.
Knowledge is power (11:25) – share as little as possible. Which means (12:09) that when someone leaves the company, much of the knowledge they created is lost.
In an increasingly-complex world, email is no longer an effective productivity tool (12:48) – nowadays the environment is complex – multi-project, multi-team, multi-geo – this means companies need open collaboration (13:36) which email cannot provide. Email has been around so long (13:50) that people are scared to try other things. Email doesn’t engender the behaviours we need to be effective in the modern business world (15:08).
Some behaviours need to be unlearned, some need to be taken from email to a new environment (15:27):
- Email is used to manage people in a bad way (15:40), and this is getting carried through into a collaborative environment (“big brother”). Example of team who put completed work on their task list so management don’t think they have been idle.
- Social networks expose the underlying behaviours (17:38) (ref @hjarche), and will help identify a dysfunctional corporate culture – some are threatened by this, but (18:15) it’s an opportunity to surface issues which the leadership need to tackle
- Bad behaviour stems from leadership (20:34) – and the behaviour of leaders on social tools will determine how the rest of the company behave
- Collaborative platforms make people accountable to each other, but allows people to expose their vulnerabilities (21:34) – which takes courage from (especially) the senior people (22:40)
- The critical importance of leadership behaviours (24:25 onwards), the importance of active engaged (and engaging) managers (26:10), and heroic leadership that can expose their own flaws (26:25)
Deep parallel between closed inbox mindset and static fixed job descriptions. What results is a series of blockages to the flow of work. (27:30)
Collaborative environment exposes the blocks, (27:56) but this leads to enquiry into the root causes of blockages, making it about the flow of work rather than about the person (28:24)
But, if you keep evolving the process to make the work better, then the job descriptions have to keep evolving too (29:08)
