Liverpool Council have banned staff from using email for internal communications on Wednesdays, in an experimental move designed to improve communication and cut back on wasteful email use (although they’re not emphasising that last benefit).
Would you support such a move at your workplace? Obviously sometimes email is much more useful for sending documents, but even counting for that, what are your opinions on the rise of email communications? Are we less effective in our verbal and non-email communications? Is there something useful to be gained by such restrictions?
If you worked in a place where people spend 90% of their time at their desks, then maybe it will work.
Most of the email I send within the building is when a) I have a data file to send b) A large number of people need to get a particular message or c) A message must get to a person in a timely manner. If we had find every person we need to exchange information with, it’d be chaos–everybody would be wandering around looking for someone, and nobody finding anyone because nobody’s in their office!
Anyway, I think that we talk to each other plenty as it is. Beats workin’, after all.
And in other news, automobiles will be banned in order to improve transportation problems; all televisions will be confiscated in the hopes of increasing the public’s access to news and entertainment; and it will now be permissible to toss out the bathwater without first checking for the presence of babies.