The Guardian's Online supplement today has a rather nice article about office e-mail; nice not least because of a lengthy quote from iSociety's own Max Nathan. Its all sensible stuff rejecting that man from Phones4U who decided to ban office e-mail as a poorly disgused PR stunt (surely "innovative knowledge management strategy" - Ed)
And directly from the article:
A less drastic course of action might have been to train Phones4U staff to use email properly. That's the view of Dr Monica Seeley, co-author, with Gerard Hargreaves, of Managing in the Email Office. She has taught executives to use IT more effectively. Now she's spending more time advising on email best practice and performs inbox audits, showing individuals where problems occur.
If your people are really that concerned with quantity and appropriate use of e-mail, training and more information are clearly called for.
Another option is to set up different internal communication mechanism, such as frequently-updated internal websites. I just attended BloggingWorks, which talked about a number of ways companies can and do use blog tools for communications and content management. Report on this soon.