Now here’s something I can really relate to — corporate e-mails. Having been a Vice President for a $400 million dollar nationwide company, qualifies me to comment on the failure in communication at the corporate level. We can all marvel at the efficiency and expediency of email. Wow, what a vast improvement over the “Memo” — you know the hard copy communication device called “interoffice mail”. This, of course, was the descendant of the telephone which was cumbersome since you actually had to pick it up and talk to someone. Ahhh, but the e-mail — now that’s something you could really get lost in. It’s kind of like video games but more interactive.

Corporate e-mails have proven to be the task master of all sorts of corporate communication. There’s scheduling a meeting, rescheduling a meeting, canceling a meeting, sending minutes to meetings, sending reports, sending updates on reports, receiving reports, revising reports, and then there are my favorites, chain letters, recipes, jokes and funny videos. All of these are considered by most corporate workers to be essential to functioning in the modern corporate environment especially the last four. But what happens when you take it away? OMG — WTF?!? No, you can’t take away my emails.

Well, from a news report from ABC News, it has been reported that with the explosion of e-mail volume reaching over 170 billion (that’s two million every second), we are over-saturated with communication and it may just not be working. In some cases, companies have found that it actually makes it harder to communicate. So, at the Chicago-based U.S. Cellular, they decided to do something about it. They banned e-mails every Friday and called it “no e-mail Friday”.

So, what happened to these stressed-out, anxious employees who couldn’t send out e-mails for a whole day? At first, they went into serious withdrawals of course, but as cleaver and as inventive as addicts are, they figured a way around this awful deprivation. They would go right on with their e-mail writing on Friday, but wouldn’t hit the ’send’ button until 12:01 am which would officially make it Saturday. Wheww! Another catastrophe avoided.




I am all too familiar with this world with not only email addicts but the new blackberry addicts. (They’re the new hybrid). There was this one VP who would sit in meetings all day with his head buried in his blackberry answering e-mails from people who weren’t in the meeting. Now I would call this guy a serious “crackberry”. If you took this guy’s blackberry away, there’s no telling what he might do. He could even go “postal” if we weren’t careful. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to find out because the company I worked for would never go along with outlawing e-mails… not even for one day.

But U.S. Cellular employees found out how it was to be without e-mail, and after a few weeks of e-mail blackouts, people were actually coming out of their cubicles on Fridays and meeting each other — imagine that. Some who had been e-mailing each other for months who thought that they worked in another country were actually across the hall from each other. And others who thought they had been communicating with a man, were shocked to hear a woman’s voice on the phone.

The bottom line at U.S. Cellular was that in implementing their no e-mail Friday, that not only did they reduce their overall e-mail volume by 75 %, they also found there was more communication and better customer service. Wow! Who would have thought that? People communicating face-to-face. What a concept. I guess in this fast-paced world of text messaging, e-mail, internet chat rooms and video-conferencing, that ‘pressing the flesh’ is not so bad after all.