By Like many of you, I just spent the last few hours trying to make some headway on my email inbox, the only 40 year old technology still at the heart of my work day. What better way to relaunch this blog on “the future of work,” I thought, than with some reflections on what work was like in the days before email.
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These days weren’t that long ago — I remember joining the strategy consultancy McKinsey & Company in the mid-90’s, and spending my entire first day in our New York office getting trained in… voicemail. Yes, voicemail.
With distributed teams working on-site at hundreds of different clients around the world, voicemail was the tool of choice at McKinsey back then for providing important project updates to the partnership. We were taught how to write an outline of our voicemail’s three main points ahead of time (there were always three main points), how to record our message clearly, and how to send it to the entire project team at once. Busy partners were trained on how to play back their voicemail at double speed to save time.
Of course, voicemail was a nightmare to work with. You couldn’t search, and you had to go through your inbox sequentially, even if the most critical message was at the end of the queue. You had to dial-in and check it constantly. The most amusing limitation was the need to record a message all in one take — I remember one of my engagement managers spending literally an hour in our team room recording and re-recording a particularly sensitive message to the partner, trying to get the tone just right while the rest of the team tried to keep a straight face. We did also have our Lotus Notes email system, but getting online was still a little dicey from a remote hotel or customer conference room, so voicemail was the channel through which important things got done. I got on email once a day to read the newsletter from HR and other office updates.
By the time I left the firm three years later, that had all changed. By then, email ruled the day. Voicemail became the thing that I checked at the end of the day to make sure there was nothing critical that I’d missed.
My point? There was a time before email. And there will be a time after email. I’m not saying that email will die, but email will someday surely assume the role that the voicemail and the written memo play in today’s workplace. Because email is, in its own way, just as broken as voicemail when it comes to supporting the way people work. Email is:
Completely unstructured, even when talking about increasingly structured things
Message centric, instead of centered on the people or topics it is about
Siloed, forever stuck in inboxes across the company instead of a centralized place where it can be discovered and shared
Asynchronous to a fault, in an increasingly realtime world
Lacks context — every email message is an island, lacking context form everything else in your business
I’m not just picking on email — that’s just one example of how the way we work today is broken. We still use spreadsheets to keep track of who is doing what, by when. We still use presentations to organize meetings and make decisions. We use text documents to jot down things we want to remember.
There must be a better way to work. That’s what I want to explore here in this blog — examining the future of work.
Of course, the future of work is already here, its just unevenly distributed (with a nod to William Gibson). In the technology industry, we get little glimpses of what the future of work might look like every day — when Box.net raises a new round of funding, when Jive files for its IPO, when Google brings a feature like Google+ to its productivity suite, when established vendors like SAP and Oracle struggle to catch up as they duke it out with vendors like Salesforce.com, and even when emerging companies like my employer Podio make us more productive doing things like collaborating on projects from our mobile devices.
But these are just glimpses. As someone who spends nearly as much time thinking about the nature of work as I do actually getting work done (sometimes to my own detriment!), I’m continually amazed by how early we are in this transition. But at least I’m not staying up late re-recording voicemails to my teammates anymore!
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