One Company Tries Life Without (Much) E-Mail

Four years ago, the 90,000 workers at Atos, a global IT-services company based in France, averaged 15 to 20 hours a week reading and writing e-mails to one another. E-mail “was becoming a burden to our employees rather than an enabler,” says human resources chief Philippe Mareine. So management issued a startling request: Stop it. Instead of e-mailing, employees were urged to communicate through an in-house social network called BlueKiwi.

Atos isn’t the only business trying to increase productivity through social networking, but it’s the only big corporation that’s tried to more or less banish e-mail among co-workers. The $12 billion-a-year company says its internal e-mail volume has fallen 70 percent since 2011, to an average of six messages per person each day. Switching to social networking “has changed how we manage and collaborate,” says Mareine. Although there’s no evidence that Atos’s “Zero E-mail” campaign contributed to the 60 percent jump in the company’s operating margins over the past four years, executives say it’s dramatically improved efficiency. Atos is now pitching BlueKiwi to IT-services clients.