Firstly, imagine the sort of cinematic pyre usually reserved for the final ‘baddie’ in movies. Now, visualize shoving all your email into it. Great or what?!

There are so many issues with companies reliance on email but I’ll put a few out there…

• Encourages silos within the business
• Encourages political game playing
• People may not have equal access to the information they need in real time or historically
• Email overload means many people don’t respond to your messages
• Often used in place of a call/meeting where a conversation would last minutes at most
• Encourages the deferring of issues or passing them around rather than resolving them
• Ridiculously hard to refer back to/search in to find historical information
• Encourages a reliance on file/attachments which then get lost – usually breaks any sort of documentation version control
• Messages are often miss-interpreted by the receiver
• Usually the message is without necessary context to enable the recipient to actually make a decision

Now I completely understand that people are very used to email however it’s a legacy of the business processes we used. All it is is an electronic memo.

I’m sure the same stupid ‘did you get my memo?’ games were played then and all email does is perpetuate the same silo organisational structure.

We’ve got access to excellent project management, scheduling, knowledge base and workflow tools that mean everyone can get/see/ and most importantly share the information in an open forum.

We began using Slack at work – it’s amazeballs because it fosters far more open communication among team members and across teams.

In a modern business where people have to collaborate then almost everything should be open and accessible internally. Email works against this goal.