Voice Mail — A Dinosaur?

In three years at Northern Seminary I’ve not used my office phone once. Nor do I even know how to use it. An occasional voice mail is left that is then sent to my email as a recording. But I’m so over office voice mail.

How about you?

PS: I hope Northern’s good folks aren’t annoyed when reading this.

Jenna McGregor:

Corporate cost-cutting measures usually aren’t something to celebrate. Layoffs. Slashing the 401(k) match. Penny-pinching efforts that put the kibosh on Friday happy hours.

But here’s one that could actually help us all: disconnecting office voice mail.

We’ve all sat through rambling, five-minute-long messages from people who really should have sent a two-line email. We’ve all screened numbers we didn’t want to answer and then — minutes later — gotten a redundant email or cell phone call. And we’ve all wondered if that automated, robotic voice saying “message. received. on. Thursday. June. 4th. at. 2. 53. pm” could really be any slower.

As M.I.T. research fellow Michael Schrage wrote in a popular Harvard Business Review article extolling the end of office voice mail, “a communications medium that was once essential has become as clunky and irrelevant as Microsoft DOS and carbon paper.”