NaBloPoMo Day 14 - Email-Free Friday?
Author: Stacy16 Nov
There was an article in last Friday’s Dallas Morning News talking about the concept of an email-free Friday. It’s kind of like Casual Friday, only you give up your emails instead of your tie or fashion-forward pumps:
First Fridays were casual. Now, at some offices, they’re e-mail free.
Advances in workplace technology have made it easier to communicate, but they’ve also led to a backlash against information overload. The concept of a day without e-mail first emerged in England about six years ago, when confectionary company Nestle Rowntree announced a Friday e-mail ban.
More recently, engineers at Intel in Santa Clara, Calif., announced a “Zero Email Friday” initiative. On Intel’s IT@Intel Blog, Nathan Zeldes explains that the idea isn’t to ban electronic correspondence but rather to encourage face-to-face interaction.
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2 Responses for "NaBloPoMo Day 14 - Email-Free Friday?"
The phrase “Zero Email Friday” is catchy and was used in most companies that tried this, but it is important to stress that it is a misnomer. The idea is that within an organic team you try to focus more on direct communication - face to face or by phone - than on email, whenever this is possible. You do NOT shut down email for the day - in fact you use it normally to communicate with people outside the team, and you use it within the team where this makes sense, for example to transfer attachments.
We are testing this in one team at Intel because we saw a tendency of people to send email to someone two cubes down the aisle, leading to a back and forth of emails that could well have been resolved by a moment of conversation…
Duly noted - that was my interpretation, as well.