This Company Banned Email And Loved It

Tony Teunis, VP of Operations at All Western Mortgage, had a problem.

Intra-office email was getting out of control. Gargantuan email threads were getting in the way of his and his employees' productivity. Workday progress slowed to a halt as everyone tried to stay on the same page.

"I'd say it was kind of a mosh pit of communication methods," said Teunis. "[We used] email, private instant messaging systems, bulletin boards, snail mail even believe it or not. It was very difficult to communicate with the size of operation we are plus how we're spread out geographically throughout the globe."

So he changed the tone of communication at the office. He banned email and implemented a product called Unison, an application for workplace collaboration (we've previously profiled it here). It pulls together text chat, Skype-like voice chat, and in-app messaging that can accommodate companies of nearly any size.

The go-to statistic from Unison is that it can generally reduce office email by 80%, but All Western Mortgage smashed that in an effort to cut out email entirely. Now that everyone is communicating on the same platform, work gets done more quickly.

Teunis said, "If an underwriter underwrites a loan, can't make a decision, and posts it and the loan committee at 7 am, it might already be out of the loan committee by 8:05. In the traditional world we had to set a loan committee meeting twice a week that took place in our offices. Now we're not held to the constraints of traditional meetings and conference calls that we were in the past."