By Susanna Kim | ABC News
You ve got mail not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending
emails under the company s new zero email policy.
CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10
percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent
is spam. That s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18
months, forcing the company s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other
via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.
Caroline Crouch, a spokeswoman for the company, told ABC News the goal is
focused on internal emails rather than external emails with clients and
partners. Atos has already reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent
in six months.
When asked how employees have responded to the policy, Crouch told ABC News the
overall response has been positive with strong take up of alternative tools.
Breton, the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, told the Wall Street
Journal he has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman
and CEO of Atos in November 2008.
We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working
environments and also encroaching into our personal lives, he said in a
statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. At [Atos] we are
taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to
reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.
Atos had revenue last year of of EUR 8.6 billion, or $11.5 billion, and has
offices in 42 countries, according to the company website.
The company says by 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the
result of updates to, and editing of existing information. Middle managers
spend more than 25 percent of their time searching for information, according
to the company.
Crouch said Atos is evaluating a number of new tools to replace internal email
including collaborative and social media tools. Those include the Atos Wiki,
which allows all employees to communicate by contributing or modifying online
content, and Office Communicator, the company s online chat system which allows
video conferencing, and file and application sharing.