You know how it is. You refresh your inbox each morning, only to be confronted with a barrage of “urgent” emails, all of which apparently require your attention. Then you spend an hour or two busily replying to each one, feeling accomplished, until you sit back and ask yourself. “What have I actually achieved this morning?” The answer, it seems, it not much at all.
We send an estimated 205 billion emails daily and the average office worker receives 121 each day, according to technology market research firm The Rdicati Group (pdf). Emailing is one of the easiest ways to waste time at work, and some business leaders have even deemed email “the cockroach of the internet” and said it makes workers “stupid busy”.
As a result, many small businesses are banning email entirely and embracing new forms of internal communication and collaborative work technologies. They’re using Slack and Hipchat; project-management systems like Trello, Jira, and Asana; cloud storage providers and productivity software; as well as instant messaging apps to solve problems and keep everyone up-to-date with projects.
If you’ve had enough of email, take back control of your overflowing inbox and embrace these modes of communication and workplace organisation instead.
Slack
Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration tool beloved of tech startups and a whole host of businesses. Co-founder Stewart Butterfield once called it “the email killer” and many entrepreneurs now use it as their default method of internal communication.
One such business owner is Martin Hedley, co-founder and CEO of The Student Nucleus. His company hired three new employees in October 2015 and in a bid to better manage the team’s communication as it grew, they started using Slack. They’ve now completely abandoned using email internally, to great effect.
“Our speed and level of communication has improved considerably,” says Hedley. “Slack’s channels feature has allowed all our team members to see what other people are working on, and [they can] easily add their views and contributions. Some of our best ideas and improvements have come through this more open communication.”
The Student Nucleus has 15 channels where employees can discuss everything from the company’s social media, to funding, branding and website development. “We even have a dedicated channel called ‘inspiration’. This ability to segment conversations into specific topics makes it far easier to find related information,” Hedley adds.
Using Slack can also help to boost company morale, according to Andi Jarvis, senior account manager at digital marketing company The Tomorrow Lab. The company began moving away from email in late 2014 because it has become increasingly difficult using it to keep track of and manage projects. As well as Slack being quicker and “more effective”, because all company communication is centralised, it can also be enjoyable. They have off-topic channels for general chat throughout the day which helps morale.
“Our staff enjoy using Slack, which is something you’d never say about email,” says Jarvis.
No longer the preserve of cash-strapped teens who can’t afford to text, free chat-based app WhatsApp is the most popular messenger app in 109 countries and businesses are embracing it, too.
Rich Pleeth, founder of the Sup App, says his company has never sent many emails internally. Instead, WhatsApp is one of the main methods of communication, along with Slack. Pleeth says his employees are more productive now. “No one writes long messages on Slack or WhatsApp. It’s to-the-point and people reply faster.”
Because WhatsApp conversations happen in real time, unlike email, he adds that WhatsApp is the easiest way for his team to communicate with each other when anyone is out of office, mainly because “our phones are never more than an arm’s reach away”.
Chloé Nelkin, founder and director of Chloé Nelkin Consulting, also uses WhatsApp rather than email. Her company cut down on using email for internal communication 18 months ago to reduce the number of irrelevant correspondence they were receiving.
“WhatsApp team conversations are a lot less formal and more instant than emails, plus they’re a quicker method of sharing images when we’re discussing our social media feeds,” she says.
Project-management systems
Using email to assign employees tasks can create a “digital blame culture” when people miss instructions, says Lee Mallon, managing director of mobile development studio Rarely Impossible, who banned internal email at his company in October 2014.
To combat this problem, they began trialling different project-management tools, including Asana, Jira, Trello and Basecamp. “We’re currently using Target Process to manage tasks and the progress of projects, which works well when you have lots of tasks you can order, deadline and assign.”
The result? After the first few weeks, the company saw a 25% boost in productivity, says Mallon, due to “work being completed quicker and there being less miscommunication. “Everyone was generally happier,” he says.
How to move on from email
Find the communication method that’s best for your business requires trial and error. But once you’ve found one, stick to it, advises Hedley. “Don’t try and incorporate all the different tools available. This can make you less efficient as you spend more time managing the different tools than actually growing your business.”
Hedley adds: “Do a little research, speak to other businesses and find one that works for your business. Then it is important to explain to your colleagues why you’re going to use this new tool and emphasise that it will only work if the whole team buys into using it.”
However, if you’re not prepared to let go of email just yet, there are little tweaks you can implement to make it more productive for your team. “Reducing email isn’t something you can do overnight across a whole company,” says Mallon. You can nevertheless make small changes to manage your inbox: from setting up email filters to prioritising messages you’re cc’d on, to getting staff to prefix subjects with task, info or meeting, so you know which emails you need to act on.
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Kia Fleet, sponsor of the Guardian Small Business Network Accessing Expertise hub.
