40% of staff time is wasted on reading internal emails

Tom Hanks in You Got Mail

By 2014 there will be no internal email within Halton Housing Trust. This isn't just a gimmick, nor is it just a case of replacing one system with another. It is a fundamental rethink of how we work, taking back control from some of the systems and cultures we have all allowed to develop during the 20 years email has been part of our working lives.

So why are we doing it? There are two main reasons for our decision.

• Independent research by Atos Origin highlighted that the average employee spends 40% of their working week dealing with internal emails which add no value to the business. In short, your colleagues only start working on anything of value from Wednesday each week. Our own analysis found worrying levels of email traffic: of 95,000 emails sent, 75,000 were internal, while 68% of the 127,000 received also came from internal sources.

• We must accept that the world has moved on. Generation Y – people born between 1980 and 2000 – now comprise 33% of the UK population. Almost all (96%) of this group are members of a social network. Analysis has shown that many members of this group do not use email outside a business environment, preferring to communicate with their peers using social media or text messages. Our own discussion with Gen Y colleagues joining us has indicated a similar finding.

The message here is that there is a significant proportion of our workforce and customer base for whom email is no longer the communication tool of choice. Several universities have also recognised this and no longer issue student email accounts.

We have become over reliant upon email and have forgotten that it should be a non-urgent form of communication which has been used for urgent purposes. How often do you have a few hours in meetings or travelling only to return to large volumes of emails that have arrived while you were out? And then the voicemails that chase up a response to an email, sent only an hour or so beforehand, just compound the problem.

When provided with a choice, which do you respond to first? An email, text, social media direct message or voicemail?

We have become slaves to our inboxes and we need to break free. This requires revisiting the basic principles behind email. Email works on the basic principle of an adult-to-child relationship. Basically you have little or no choice over what you are "fed" (unless you are one of a very small minority of people who use filters to channel your email into folders). It is then your responsibility to sift through the pile to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Our efforts to ban internal email mark a move towards an adult-to-adult relationship with our staff. As an individual you take responsibility for keeping yourself informed. The organisation will provide information, but through the use of collaborative software you determine yourself what information you receive and also control the frequency of these updates.

Throughout 2013 we will be reviewing the alternatives to email that are available, as well as learning from a number of other organisations that have already successfully made the switch away from email and are reaping the productivity rewards. We'll also help our staff to break their email addiction and ask them to help us find a more effective alternative.

In the interim, we have asked colleagues to sign up to an "email charter" including a list of the top 10 dos and don'ts online. We will be publishing a monthly league table of the top 10 senders and recipients of internal email, and make increased use of our intranet to share information. We have also introduced an automated reply message that clearly indicates emails will be reviewed only three times each day, and provide alternative ways to contact our staff for urgent issues.

We are witnessing a revolution. Many of the counterarguments to our proposals reflect the very points raised in the early 1990s, when email began to replace the typing pool and the responsibility for communications shifted from a few individuals to every member staff.

In a world where value for money and efficiency are the focus of housing professionals, how much longer can we go on accepting that 40% of our working time is adding no value to our respective businesses?