Thierry Breton, CEO of an international company providing IT services in 42 countries called Atos, announced gradual abolition of using e-mail for internal communication. BBC pubslihed an interview in which Breton explains his motives and plans. Internal e-mail in Atos should be abolished at the beginning of 2014. So far, it has been used by 80,000 employees.
Abolition of internal e-mail is a part of corporate initiative called Wellbeing At Work that Atos launched three years ago. It is a knowledge network consisting of new talents in the company. It aims to enable employees to come up with new ideas for improving their working conditions. The practice of recent years has shown that the majority of young talents does not use e-mail any more. They prefer social networks and instant messaging.
Accoriding to Thierry Breton, employees welcomed his plan. Just the announcement of forthcoming measures led to a decline in the use of internal e-mail by 20%. Previous internal analysis showed that the volume of internal e-mails was constantly growing while only 15% of them were useful. Since employees view e-mails both at work and at home, it took 15 to 20 hours per week to check and respond to internal e-mails. That is why a team whose task was to find more effective internal communication tools had been formed.
In these day, a pilot program in which employees learn to work with new tools is running n the company. The tools include cloud computing, social networking, instant messaging, microblogging, document sharing, creating knowledge communities and the like. First 500 employees already end using e-mail for internal purposes. Breton himself has not been using e-mail for internal purposes for five or six years. He assumes that it will be quickly abolished in other companies as well.
Thierry Breton is the former CEO of France Telecom. He also served as French Minister for Trade, Finance and Industry. Before joining Atos three years ago, he had been lecturing at Harvard Business School for two years.
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