Why email is on a life support machine?

There have been countless articles, blogs and videos on the topic related to how one manages their email from 'inbox zero' to 'managed chaos'. We have all seen the theories, methodologies on email management solutions.

My personal view is that people fall into different categories based on personality and training so we should not judge either way. In my sales roles, I have seen team members smash targets who have employed both styles of workflows. Our brains all function differently.

But these are all treatments for the problem and do not address the real issue of how we manage business communication today, particularly internal communication.

In this blog, I will explain how to reduce email usage by stopping people sending them in the first place and enable you to increase your productivity as a result.

In my personal life I do not use email. I use Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and iMessage to manage all my personal comms. These are the channels that allow me to connect with friends and family, collaborate in my communities and consume information and receive announcements.

However until recently if I were to interact with colleagues, clients or partners in my corporate life, the go-to channel was email. But email is clunky. We spend too much time digesting, labelling and responding to email plus it lacks real-time interaction. Email has become an evil in some ways but it does not need to be that way.

So what is the answer? Go social at work.

There have been a plethora of platforms that I like to use such as Trello, Quip and Evernote yet none of them have addressed the email issue.

The solution is an enterprise social network, and I'm biased, you need to deploy Workplace by Facebook. Your employees will love you for it. I can make that claim because at Coolr we do not send any internal emails, ever!!!

All internal conversations take place in Workplace groups, Work Chat, Video and more.

For example I used to email my team members sharing a new idea and requested feedback. The emails would flood back in and I would have no way of knowing the real response. In Workplace I launch a poll or post a group message and view the feedback by way of data and comments.

In fact, we practice what we preach so much at Coolr that all our clients love to converse and work with us in Workplace 'Multi-Company Groups' so we do not receive emails from clients either. What happens in Workplace, stays in Workplace so we have that long term memory bank and data.

Workplace has reduced my email consumption by over 70% with the only emails I receive today coming from potential new clients (or spam!). This has made me and our teams more productive because we are not managing inboxes or crafting beautifully written email responses. Our conversations in groups or chat are focused, and collaborative work is on-point so we get the work done more efficiently.

Workplace also helps us feel more connected to each other as we are interacting in a social channel that builds teamwork, develops rapport and is just so much more engaging. It just works! It brings the style of tools we use in our personal world to the business arena.

I will leave you with this post below from the CEO of Air Asia after his company deployed Workplace by Facebook. Says it all.

Be in touch with me if you want to bring this change to your company. No emails please - message me in LinkedIn or on all channels @robertcurtispro