Volkswagen Takes Its Email Servers Offline After Hours

Welsh translation, from BBC:
"I am not in the office at the moment.
Send any work to be translated."

The BBC has reported that Volkswagen, in response to employee concerns, will be suspending delivery of email to its employees' Blackberries outside of normal working hours.

Another major European company, Atos, recently made shock waves when they announced that they were banning internal e-mail because it wasted so much employee time. The CEO of Atos claimed that employees received an average of 200+ emails per day, resulting in 5 to 20 hours per week of work time simply dealing with email (a good portion of that seemingly spent outside normal working hours).


I've been hearing more and more that "kids these days" have abandoned email in favour of texting, instant messaging and social media. I can see why.

The novelty wore off on email a long time ago. My inbox is full of messages I've been meaning to respond to, some of them, I'm embarrassed to admit, dating back more than two years. These are people I actually do want to communicate with, but I can never get in the right frame of mind to compose a reply.

Technology may have given us the ability to communicate quickly with a lot of people but it has offered little to help us deal with the increase in information we now have to deal with. Instant messaging allows us to deal with things in real time and then move on with life. If there are too many people messaging you, just log off or go invisible.

It seems that more and more companies are recognizing that email has added more burden than it has lifted and I applaud Volkswagen and Atos for attempting to alleviate that.

It will be very interesting to see what happens to email as we know it over the next few years.