Today about 150 engineers at chipmaker Intel (INTC) will kick off “Zero E-mail Fridays.” E-mail isn’t forbidden, but everyone is encouraged to phone or meet face-to-face. The goal is more direct, free-flowing communication and better exchange of ideas, Intel principal engineer Nathan Zeldes says in a company blog post.
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why is this a good idea? The tool (email) is good — it’s like banning hammers from a construction site because someone nailed a thumb…
Actually, “Zero email day”, though in common use, is a misnomer. Our experiment is not about banning the use of email; it’s about encouraging people WITHIN a group to prefer direct communication, face to face or by phone, to email — WHEN this is appropriate. The idea is to move away from the growing tendency of people to engage in possibly long email threads with someone sitting across the aisle from them, in cases where a 60 second conversation would do the job. This has been tried in a number of companies with positive outcomes.
This is a good idea because email is excessively used, especially in large organisations. There some many other options for communicating that are more efficient. I think we’ll try this at my company.