We’ve talked before about the rise of mobility in the workplace. A parallel evolution is the increasing speed and volume of business communication. The announcement of “zero email” by French IT services company, Atos Origin, is still getting media coverage after being announced back in February. For a big company that has been using email for over a decade, giving it up is a revelation. For smaller companies that have the benefit of starting fresh, it just makes practical sense.

As I’ve written previously, if you were starting your business today, what would you do for communications?

• You would have real-time conversations (one-to-one or many-to-many) for hot topics like product testing or customer support.
• You would broadcast general information like market analysis, company events and policies, or new builds.
• Asynchronous, one-to-one or one-to-many targeted communications (email) would become limited to customer interactions, confidential communications, notifications and our unwanted friend, spam.
• In each case, you would want to reference a persistent repository so that you weren’t storing and sending multiple copies of the same file.

I’ve been doing this for four months now, and the change in workflow is dramatic.

Before, there would be a continuous stream of incoming and outgoing email throughout the day. A typical day looked like the below chart. All types of communications were lumped together because email was the one mechanism that was always available regardless of the device and the location. Because urgent email was mixed with less timely messages, things went to the lowest common denominator: people expected quick responses. As multi-tasking research has proven over and over again, this caused major disruption.

Now my day looks like this:

The number of emails (blue bar) have dropped by 60%, and I don’t feel the need to check constantly. Status broadcasts happen a few times a day and again can be reviewed later, or at distinct times during the day. Only chats require immediate attention, and those can be used very effectively for bursts of creating something, figuring out a problem, strategizing, etc. And then it ends and things quiet down again. When you compare the two charts, there are actual blocks of uninterrupted time in the post-email version. Makes me think I need to look at it more closely and clean it up further…

Complementing this new workflow is the ability to refer to documents consistently, across all the mediums, accessible on any device anywhere. With Oxygen, we can refer colleagues or external partners to working files in shared spaces, using email, status or chat. The limits of communication style, device type, file size, file type are all eliminated.

I’ll report back regularly on this new style of working, particularly around productivity. It sure feels a lot easier…

- Leo (@lleung)