Email was first put into practice in 1971 and it’s still going strong, but the rise of social media and collaboration software has people questioning its longevity. So… is internal email dead?
Is email still your preferred way for you to talk to your colleagues?
The easiest way to answer this question is to look at the statistics. Research conducted by the Radicati Group in February 2017 estimated that there are 3.7 billion emails accounts worldwide and 269 billion emails sent per day in 2017 with a predicted annual growth of 4.4%. The staggering amount of emails sent, coupled with the steady growth suggests that email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
What are email’s shortcomings?
A common criticism of email is that it’s not suitable for knowledge management and collaboration – Richard Hughes (Director of Digital Strategy at Broadvision) expands on this in an interview:
"For simple ephemeral messaging, email is great. It works on any device. You can probably run it on your fridge! As a repository of knowledge, though, it’s really poor. As a collaboration tool, really poor. As a means of ensuring something gets done, really poor.”
Think about how inconvenient it was the last time someone asked you for a file and your response was ‘Sure, I’ll send it to you. It’s buried somewhere in my inbox…’. Many companies have adopted CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems and collaboration software to control the processes that email cannot handle. Some collaboration software claims to replace internal emails outright.
What are the alternatives to email?
You may have heard of Slack and Workplace by Facebook. Slack works by integrating your email with other apps such as Dropbox and Salesforce whereas Workplace by Facebook replaces email completely. Its features include team groups, live video broadcasts, multi-company groups and the list goes on. What all these features have in common is collaboration – one of the most integral aspects of internal communication in the workplace – something that email systems cannot efficiently accommodate.
Workplace by Facebook certainly aren’t subtle about their intentions of replacing email in the office with a logo that’s a rendition of the ‘@’ symbol:
Why is email still relevant in the workplace?
Software such as Slack and Workplace are reducing our dependency on email for internal communication but they can’t replace it outright due to the email’s ubiquity – almost everyone has a basic understanding of how to use it and it’s cheap to setup, host and run. These factors have resulted in email still being the preferred method of internal communication with only 30% of people believing corporate messages are NOT best sent by email and only 27% believing that internal social networks will replace email in the next five years.
Richard Hughes sums it up well:
“I think email can become a productivity tool, as we know, but it can also become a compulsive tool”.
The trap most companies fall into is using email as a general tool for internal communication without investing in training and processes to improve productivity.
It seems we’ll be using email for at least the foreseeable future. That’s not to say alternative systems such as Workplace won’t grow in popularity, but whether or not they’ll knock email off the top spot remains to be seen.
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