Andrew Marritt said...
Interesting, and thanks for picking up on the conversation.
Most of my research came from the financial sector, specifically retail banking. In Europe I suspect the TP / HR.com assertion of universal self-service is not here. There are major banks, for example, employing tens of thousands and rating in the top 10 banks in the world where neither email access nor intranets are available to all employees.
I have worked within professional services & I suspect that in those organisations you see a very different world than most people. If you are not in some ways a 'high performer' in the traditional up-or-out consultancy you'll not last long.
The big issue here is whether a message is read and acted upon. The intranet or email may deliver the message but that doesn't mean that the message is acted upon. I agree with the risk of messages changing, though you can design a process to reduce this. Electronic messages are easy to bypass. Just because the message is available doesn't mean that it's going to be effective.
Finally, one factor worth considering is that you or I are obviously highly motivated to communicate via electronic channels - hence why we blog. Most people aren't like this & therefore just because I respond to electronic messages and you probably do doesn't mean we should use these channels as a primary one.
