Should all employees have e-mail?

A forecast published nearly two years ago (not from Osterman Research) showed that nearly half of workers did not have employer-provided access to e-mail while on the job, but that three out of four workers would have e-mail access by 2007. The argument for the rapid uptake was that providing e-mail for all employees is a good business practice and that other forms of information delivery, such as paper communications, are inferior to e-mail. While I agree with the conclusions of that study to some extent and still expect “un-e-mailed” workers to be given access to this medium in larger numbers than at present, I believe there is a significant portion of the workforce in industrialized nations that will never have access to employer-provided e-mail.

There are two reasons.

First, a disproportionate share of un-e-mailed workers are paid hourly. While e-mail is generally a cost of doing business, the cost of accessing it is typically masked because a large percentage of people who use e-mail are paid a salary, not hourly.

If a user is making $70,000 per year regardless of how many hours he or she works, the cost of their access to e-mail is a sunk cost that is difficult – and more or less meaningless – to quantify. On the other hand, if a worker is paid $20 per hour, checking e-mail for 15 minutes each day costs his or her employer $5 per day, or well over $1,000 annually. That cost can be an order or magnitude or more higher than the cost of providing e-mail itself, making the justification for providing e-mail to an hourly worker quite difficult.

Second, for many organizations it’s difficult to justify implementing and managing an e-mail system that is designed simply to replace memos and other information posted on a bulletin board. Plus, e-mail creates additional liabilities and requirements, including the need to filter for spam and viruses, outgoing content, etc., that traditional forms of communications do not.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on why (or why not) workers without access to e-mail need to have it, particularly if you’ve gone through the process of debating this within your organization. Please drop me a line at mailto:michael@ostermanresearch.com