Do you know any teenagers? If you do, you know that email is something they think old and out of touch people use. They are much more likely to be reached by text message, twitter, MySpace, or Facebook postings. If you expect one of them to respond to an email, you are asking them to do a very un-cool deed. Some of them will reply out of respect for the elder (obviously elder, or it wouldn't have been an email) who sent it to them, but most teenagers will look at you blankly when you ask about the email you sent and say something like, "If it isn't a text message, I don't read it." Or my favorite from a well-provided-for high school senior, "Email? What's that?"
So... this is a clue that the next generation of workers probably won't use email as their primary communication medium at work. And that opens up a whole new discussion on Web2.0/Enterprise2.0 …but I won’t go there now.

But where does that leave the rest of us who are already IN the workforce and are completely inundated by email? Jesse made a point last week that discovery costs are a big component of the ROI for companies to manage email effectively. I’ve done that math, too, and agree completely. But is there another ROI as well? The ROI of workforce sanity? Productivity? Focus? I read a couple of years ago that someone had conducted a study and concluded that email was more distracting to a knowledge worker’s ability to do their job than smoking marijuana would be. WHAT? You’re kidding, right? Well, I read it in an email, so it must be true. Seriously, here is a reference to the 2005 study in a 2007 article in the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com). I include it because I thought that within 2 (now 4) years of the study’s publication, someone would have conducted another study to contradict the results. But it seems that no one has:
“In 2005, a psychiatrist at King's College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hand, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-ferriss/marijuana-trumps-blackber_b_46595.html)

The related CNN report can be found here: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/04/22/text.iq/

I think implementing a state of the art email management system (or suite of systems) is critical to an organization’s ongoing success, whether we are discussing how to contain their discovery costs or how to increase their workforce productivity. AND I think that changing workforce behavior regarding email (and text messaging and all things 2.0) is imperative. So there we are: install new systems and train everyone to work differently. That’s easy to do, right? :-) If only.