Everybody hates email; employees, management, and even IT departments all despise email with good reasons. It’s unreliable, unmanageable, and unending.
Email collaboration is counter-productive.
People waste a lot of valuable time writing emails, responding to them, and getting people to stop hitting “Reply All.” In fact, Andrew Killick of Modeuro Consulting thinks 40% of an employee’s time is wasted dealing with internal emails that have no business value.
Frankly, email is rarely the right tool for the job: “Eighty percent of email traffic is waste,” says Killick, and that most companies could realize 5%-30% more productivity by cutting back on email.
But email erodes productivity more than managers think, in ways that are less obvious and, ultimately, even more damaging.
Email doesn’t just kill productivity in the present.
In addition to wasting the time of current employees, email “silos” knowledge away in email clients and on servers where future employees can’t find, access, or use it. You’ve probably got tons of valuable knowledge, files, and other information locked away in your email client and so does each of your colleagues — your email server is a veritable graveyard of sunk costs and company knowledge.
Because, even when everyone in an organization is included on an email thread, the content of that conversation (including any attached files) is unknown and unavailable to anyone who joins the company the next day. Or the day after that. Or the month after that.
Sure, YOU have it in your email client, but there’s no easy way for new hires to even know the information exists or where it is. They’re then forced to duplicate those efforts, essentially “reinventing the wheel” on the company’s dime.
And that’s a major hit to productivity — making current and future employees chase down or recreate existing knowledge and information over and over again. But that’s not the only other problem with email.
Email isn’t a file-sharing protocol.
Email was never intended to be used as a file-sharing system. So it wasn’t designed to handle multi-megabyte attachments but, more importantly, it doesn’t have any version control features.
What’s version control? It’s the technology that keeps one employee from working on one version of a document while the rest of their colleagues are working on a newer version.
Even if employees could search their colleague’s email, there’s no easy way to determine which file is the latest version (someone could be working on a new version on their desktop right now). Using email for collaboration is just a recipe for waste and work duplication.
How tibbr solves email’s problems
Developed as a social collaboration and sharing platform right from the outset, tibbr avoids all of email’s shortcomings by design, and adds a ton of other productivity features.
tibbr is searchable by anyone in the organization at any time (assuming they have the right permissions). tibbr conversations are easy for people to read in order and interpret as they happened, including any conclusions and files being referenced. And tibbr makes it easy to determine the most recent version of a file.
But we realize that email isn’t going away anytime soon, so tibbr integrates with email, too. For people who love email, preferences can make any posts to tibbr automatically trigger emails that they can respond via email which will appear in the discussion.
If you’d like to see how the tibbr Enterprise Social Platform can help your company use less email and be more productive, click here for a free trial.
