Face-to-face meetings still alive and well in email age

NEWS Workers still prefer face-to-face communication, despite the explosion of email traffic. Over 1,000 readers completed the silicon.com Digital Blunders survey revealing that human contact cannot always be replaced by electronic communications. Almost 63 per cent of respondents said the introduction of email at their company had not reduced real-life interaction with their managers. While there was a fairly even split in the number of people who have reduced other types of face-to-face meetings and those that haven't, the explanation could be in the types of meetings people are involved in. Meetings used to simply disseminate information can be justifiably eradicated by email. However, Rebecca Ulph, analyst at Forrester Research, explained that group activities such as brainstorming just don't work via email partly because it's so time-consuming to communicate some concepts in a written way but also because body language is so useful in the whole ideas process. Email also provides a veil for the sender giving them the confidence to push the boundaries of what is appropriate at work. The Digital Blunders survey revealed that more than 20 per cent of those polled have three email addresses. Amazingly, 10 per cent had twenty or more addresses. Jonathan Robinson, CEO of NetBenefit, pinpoints the anonymity factor as one of the main contributory factors to the growing amount of addresses. The company, which provides domain name registration services, actively encourages its customers to have a personal email address that is not associated with their employer but might be used for work-related activities, such as finding a new job. Ulph agreed. She explained that the growing use of a web-based email address while at work prevents employers' servers being inundated with irrelevant spam. She added: "This is possibly a growing trend, especially as publicity surrounding the monitoring of work emails becomes increasingly understood by novice internet users." To visit silicon.com's Digital Blunders site and find out just how wrong you can go with a simple email, visit http://www.silicon.com/digitalblunders where you will find stories like this one: "When I was getting divorced, my now ex-wife sent me an email telling me she couldn't afford to live in our flat and therefore wanted me to buy her out. I forwarded this to a mate, adding the comment: "Fantastic, the flat is going to turn into a Grade A bachelor pad, let's start pulling cheap sluts," and unfortunately copied her in the reply." For more email confessions, visit http://www.silicon.com/digitalblunders