The word inbox is enough to send a collective groan of resignation through a room of the most committed staff members. Email has become habitual. Every day we log on and open our inboxes, only to complain about the amount of emails waiting for us and to feel stressed at all those little red flags staring us in the face. Don’t get us started on High Priority exclamation marks or those bold black numbers next to the clutter folder clicking ever-upwards. We loathe email but we are addicted to it.
Two years ago CMS Wire explored reasons why Yammer hadn’t taken off stating that the main reason was that although it was a great product, people simply weren’t using it or any other corporate social network for that matter. The article went on to say that, what if the problem is not about difficulty or learning curves but about culture? What if the problem with Yammer has nothing to do with the product itself and nothing to with usability, but rather with the fact that enterprise workers are holding onto email for dear life and are not prepared to give it up?
Social enterprise tools vs email
According to The Radicati Group, Inc each day in 2016 we send approximately 115 billion business emails, there is a projected year on year growth of 3% for business emails for the foreseeable future. Yet, the war against email has been raging for years.
Slack, launched in 2013, was the first next generation app to really make a stand against email. Slack claims that it cuts internal email traffic by almost 50%. It also shows to increase team transparency, reduce meetings, improve company culture, make information easier to find and increase productivity. The adoption of Slack has been strong in the tech industry, no wonder then they market their product as "a messaging app for teams who put robots on Mars."
It's not only social enterprise tools that have made our need for email diminish, cloud technology has opened up a whole range of tools to make working easier. We are now easily able to share and edit documents via the cloud; use message services like Skype for Business; or drag, drop and share complete projects via products like OneNote. While our need for email has diminished, our reliance on it has not despite all these new weapons at our fingertips.
"Email is where knowledge goes to die" - Bill French
Email is still central to business, but the reliance on it as the sole communication tool will, or should, subside. Email closes off information and knowledge, creates redundancies like people unwittingly answering the same queries, reduces collaboration and transparency. The time has come to step away from our inboxes and instead use these new tools we’ve been gifted like Slack, Yammer, Chatter, or the brand new Workplace.
Workplace, formerly Facebook At Work was released to the public earlier this week. According to the Facebook newsroom, We’ve brought the best of Facebook to the workplace — whether it’s basic infrastructure such as News Feed, or the ability to create and share in Groups or via chat, or useful features such as Live, Reactions, Search and Trending posts. This means you can chat with a colleague across the world in real time, host a virtual brainstorm in a Group, or follow along with your CEO’s presentation on Facebook Live.
And as an added bonus there are already 1.7 billion who know how to use it.
At The Missing Link we use Yammer integrated with SharePoint. It’s nicely featured in a window on our SharePoint homepage which is our go-to, no more trawling through folders and drives; information searches are quick and easy thanks to tagging and referencing, and Yammer is right in front of us each day.
What will push social enterprise tools to the tipping point?
Some people are sceptical about the social enterprise tools, claiming that they just move the conversation from one platform to another. Our experience shows otherwise. Social enterprise tools are a fantastic way to retain corporate knowledge for the benefit of everyone but they need to be adopted in the right way for them to work. Training, behaviour modelling and a culture shift, are all key ways to get your chosen social enterprise tool off the ground.
You can’t roll out these tools and expect them to simply work. Staff will need training despite the fact they might spend hours on social networks in their personal lives; they need to be shown how the platforms work professionally. Work-life fluidity is flourishing and although these days we tend to be ‘always on’, it’s not something that everyone wants, or needs, to be aware of. Staff could be concerned about work dominance in all areas of their lives including social media; they don’t want all their waking hours to be defined by work applications. Training needs to emphasis the distinction in function between social media and social enterprise tools. It will be important to highlight that email is not dead, but its function will change; rules need to be created about what work belongs where.
Leadership should model the behaviour they want their staff to adopt. Staff will not get off email and into collaboration if they are not lead there. Social enterprise tools need to become the centre of the organisation; when the CEO wants an opinion on policy or an updated document that is where he/she should go to find the information needed.
What next?
It’s time that we picked up our arsenal in the war against email and actually put it to the use it was intended. Never before have we had so many reasons to shift away from email reliance. We are standing at the edge of a tipping point; collectively we can get there.
