Dumping email could actually fuel your business
Email is closed by default — and this limits growth
First published onNov 23, 2020
One of the great obsessions of modern business is finding more and more ways to communicate, especially in an age that has seen working from home become the norm. From Microsoft Teams to Slack, Miro to Google Workspace, there’s a multitude of collaboration apps and APIs out there designed to bring teams together.
So it’s a surprise to meet a company founder who had actively taken away one of the world’s fundamental communication tools: email. And it’s even more startling to learn that, far from closing down communication, he believes this has led to a company culture that is more open, not less.
When Tom Brown launched The Information Lab 10 years ago — now a 310-strong international consulting company — he was adamant that there would be no use of email for internal communication.
“In my previous job I’d started experimenting with different tools for internal communication, and it was super-difficult to completely stop internal email. So when my first team member joined, we didn’t have an office location and we decided at that point we wouldn’t use email. Your internal communication system is probably one of the defining systems of your business, yet there are a plethora of ways you could choose to internally communicate.”
But given that it’s a system with which almost everyone in the world is now familiar, just what is it about email that Brown finds so objectionable?
“Well there are so many negatives for email, and then so many positives for other systems,” he says. “But the biggest negative I would have for email is its exclusivity. The ‘To’ box masquerades as an opportunity to include people, but in fact it’s an opportunity to exclude people. I’m very unlikely to put a lot of people in the To box, and in fact email best practice would tell you to try and restrict the number of people you include.”
In other words, while Brown was seeking a format that was open by default, he considers email primarily closed by default. Of course, this is not to say he has completely abandoned email — for external communication email remains, naturally, an important conduit. But his concern for keeping the internal company culture as open as possible has meant that his insistence on excluding email has never faltered.
In his counterintuitive but highly successful world, you can communicate more with your company by communicating less — but to more people.
“The amount of communication that’s necessary to keep everybody knowing what’s going on is tiny,” he insists. “Any company that complains they get 300 emails a day to keep everyone aligned would be surprised to find out how little information you really need to share each day. Maybe 20 messages a day for a company of 200 staff, maybe 50.
“And the benefit of keeping people aligned is that they don’t feel excluded and therefore somehow marginalised in the business. So they remain happy and motivated. If you whisper behind someone’s back, I can’t think of a worse way to treat staff, and of course every email that’s sent without including everyone is a whisper behind your back.”
In fact, he argues, most businesses spend time trying to “optimise the amount of whispering”, by learning to use small distribution groups, to minimise email traffic in the business, learning not to CC everyone. That is, he says, training us into exclusiveness.
While an exciting prospect in theory, the idea of an entirely open communication culture is also a touch scary — especially in a business world that often incentivises back-covering. Opening up when things don’t work as expected is anathema to many businesses used to spinning mediocrity into success and glossing over failure. For Brown, that’s no deterrent — indeed, it’s a positive point, even when it’s questioning the communication structure he’s so attached to.
The tool he landed on to replace email is Convo, a web-based communication and collaboration platform that enables everything from instant messaging and document sharing to integrations such as a ‘birthday bot’ that lets the team know when it’s a colleague’s birthday. As a way of communication, it’s about as open as it gets.
“When we have conversations about our tool not working well for communication, we do it in public and everybody gets involved in that conversation, because there’s no other way to communicate, you know?”
That’s not to say that no private communication goes on — but it’s a bare minimum, says Tom. “I would say 95% or more of my posts on here would go to the UK or to everyone, but I can also say, well, I just want to chat to Mike. It’s like a more informal email, and if then I wanted to later bring someone else in, I’m just going to go ahead and do that.”
That informality is clearly a big part of the appeal of this approach too — what you might call the ‘body language’ of an email versus a direct message. There’s no subject line, no need for a formal salutation or loaded sign-off, and all the nuance and implicit meaning that goes along with a choice between, say, ‘Best wishes’ and ‘All the best’.
Equally, the platform has been exceptionally easy for new offices to plug into, as well as offering a faster, more efficient way to find solutions to problems. “We’re crowdsourcing the answers to questions; crowdsourcing, you know, with this little post that has probably been read by 40 people within a few minutes.”
Brown is never less than passionate about his approach and he acknowledges that he’s had to remind his people to use the system in the way it’s intended rather than go back to email. But his persistence is unsurprising given that he puts the success and growth of the business almost entirely down to this way of working.
“It’s been the fundamental thing that’s kept the team together,” he says, “And the team staying together has been responsible for the growth.”
Which is the most compelling proof of all. Is ditching email in favour of an app the right approach for every business? Probably not. But will every business benefit from a more open culture? Without a doubt.
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