By Rachel Feintzeig
A wave of new startups is taking aim at corporate email,
promising to disrupt the mode of communication that office dwellers
love to hate. But the old inbox is putting up a fight.
Slack, which lets employees keep track of projects or topics via
open, searchable feeds, was released to the public in February and
recently raised $42.75 million in fresh funding. It counts more
than 96,000 active daily users, including some at companies like
Airbnb Inc.
Asana, led by former engineers at Facebook Inc. and launched in
2011, promises "teamwork without email" by allowing users to
create, assign and comment on specific tasks. It has won devotees
at tech players like Uber Inc. and Foursquare. The company said it
has thousands of paying customers but didn't disclose the exact
number of users.
Despite the praise of these early adopters, managers and digital
experts say technological and social hurdles remain. For now, they
say, the promise of a world without email is a fantasy for the
majority of corporate workers.
Email usage is "exploding," said Gloria Mark, a professor at the
University of California, Irvine, who has studied how workers
interact with the technology. Not only are workers wading through
ever more clogged inboxes, they're also checking frequently, an
average of 74 times a day, according to coming research from Prof.
Mark.
The result: distracted workers. A 2012 study from Prof. Mark and
several colleagues found that workers who were cut off from their
email focused for longer periods of time, switching screens less
frequently, and were less stressed, as measured by heart-rate
monitors.
"It's really out of control," she said of email usage.
Some small companies say they've been able to kick the habit.
Treehouse Island Inc., an online coding school based in Portland,
Ore., said most of its 72 employees receive two to three emails a
day. Last year, the company shifted internal communication to three
different programs, including the instant messaging service
HipChat. Workers are happier and getting more done, said Chief
Executive Ryan Carson.
But other companies' experiments haven't fared as well, either
because of ingrained habits or because the new systems became as
overwhelming as their predecessor.
Myplanet Internet Solutions Ltd., which builds applications and
e-commerce platforms, started using Slack last August. Slack's
feeds, called "channels," feature messages, files and accompanying
comments, images and video. Users can also pull in outside streams
of information--like Twitter feeds--tag colleagues to alert them to
a post and send private messages.
Previously, Myplanet's 83 employees were toggling between email,
video-chat program Skype, and social network Yammer. After Slack
was introduced, only about half the staff ended up using it. Many
clung to Skype, and email usage didn't decrease, according to
Yashar Rassoulli, the company's technology director.
A Myplanet survey revealed that employees felt better informed
about what other people in the company were doing after using Slack
but also felt more distracted by all the conversation.
Technological quirks also bothered, and in some cases alienated,
Myplanet employees. Workers would lose track of conversations;
while a fresh email always lands at the top of someone's inbox, a
new message on an old Slack conversation wasn't automatically
placed at the top of the feed, said Mr. Rassoulli. And visually
impaired employees at the company found that Slack didn't sync with
the programs they used to work via computer.
The company stopped using Slack in April.
A spokesman for San Francisco-based Slack said it has made
enhancements to the program since Myplanet stopped using it, and
that new messages always go to the top of the feed. It also plans
to eventually explore making the program compatible with screen
readers for the visually impaired, the spokesman said.
Stewart Butterfield, Slack's CEO, acknowledged the product's
limitations, especially when it comes to bigger companies, where
there is an incredible amount of information to be wrangled. He
said the product works best with boundaries, like a smaller
team--50 to 200 people.
"If you try to bring in all the information that's relevant to
10,000 people, there's no good way to manage it," he said.
Some big businesses say they are hesitant to embark on
companywide anti-email campaigns. Neither Slack nor Asana have
converted entire Fortune 500 companies into clients. Instead, small
teams at large companies like Adobe Systems Inc. use Slack,
according to Mr. Butterfield. He said teams often start using the
product without gaining formal corporate approval. Adobe declined
to comment.
Both Slack and Asana are rolling out functions intended to ease
their integration at bigger companies. Mr. Butterfield said it will
be years before an entire Fortune 500 company could use Slack on an
organizational level.
Whirlpool Corp. is transitioning to the Google suite of
products, including Google chat and Google Drive, in the hopes of
showing its approximately 70,000 employees that email isn't the
only form of communication, said Lynanne Kunkel, the company's vice
president of global talent development. Still, Whirlpool doesn't
have a commitment to eliminating the form of communication, Ms.
Kunkel said.
"Email is an important part of my portfolio," she said.
Workers who spend a lot of time communicating with the outside
world might find it difficult to shift away from email in the near
future. Clients might not have a desire to adopt new technology,
and even if they did, technological and organizational barriers
would probably prevent them from gaining access, said Ted Schadler,
a technology analyst with Forrester Research Inc.
Slack said it's working on restricted accounts, which would let
clients or contractors use certain services but keep them out of
other areas of the program.
Mr. Schadler said corporate workers shouldn't expect email's
demise any time soon.
"People use email because it's the best, most reliable way to
get to anybody on the planet and none of these other tools let you
do that; none of them," he said.
Write to Rachel Feintzeig at rachel.feintzeig@wsj.com
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