Atos, one of Europe’s leading digital services companies, has been leading the way in efforts to reduce email traffic in its organisation. 

It launched the company’s Zero Email initiative back in 2011 and since then the company has experienced an average 70 percent reduction per employee in email traffic and around 220 business processes have been zero email certified. Following recent comments made by Professor Sir Cary Cooper at the British Psychological Society conference in Liverpool regarding emails “contributing to a lack of productivity” in Britain’s workforce, please find a comment below from Marc Mosthav, CIO for Atos in the UK&I, along with some of the key achievements that have come from the introduction of the company’s Zero Email initiative.

Marc Mosthav, CIO Atos UK&I, said: “We launched our Zero Email initiative to reduce internal email in 2011.  Major cultural change is at the heart of our program to enable all of us to adopt new ways of working and behaviours that help improve the workplace. We have introduced a number of social collaboration tools which encourage more conversation. This has changed the way we think about communication and made us more productive.”

Our achievements in figures include: Average 70 percent e-mail reduction per employee from 100 to 30 e-mail per week /per employee. Including 1000 Zero Heroes who don’t use any internal e-mail and support others to achieve the same; 3500 change agents and ambassadors worldwide supported the cultural and behavioral change on a massive scale; 5000 managers completed dedicated training for leadership in a collaborative environment; Training tools and support for all employees to use the right tools for the right job, to save time and work more effectively; A balanced mix of supporting technology including blueKiwi, our enterprise social network, Lync for communications and chat, SharePoint for document management and LiveMeeting for conference calls; 86,000 + Atos employees profiles completed in blueKiwi; 68 percent of staff are active users, posting 1 or more collaborative notes per week; 85 percent of top (700) managers are active users. 9000 purpose built communities of which 80 percent have a trained community leader and 220 business processes have been Zero e-mail certified.