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I was in the audience recently when the president of a multi-billion-dollar healthcare subsidiary told his top 100 leaders, “I don’t use email anymore.”

As the room went silent with surprise, the president conceded he was exaggerating to make a point: It’s far too easy these days to “communicate” by email, eliminating any opportunity for personal dialog or a personal connection. The president wanted his top leaders to know that he expected them to play an active role as communicators around an aggressive new growth strategy that most acknowledged would ruffle more than a few employee feathers.

Cheers to him for making the push. Every time I meet with groups of computer-equipped employees – regardless of the size or nature of their organization – they tell me they hate managing their email in boxes. Some admit that they read as few as one of every five emails they receive. And that means you’ve got a one-in-five shot at capturing their attention if you’re relying on email as your primary communications vehicle. As Matt wrote in an earlier post, more than seven in ten workers feel completely inundated with information.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that anyone abandon email altogether. I’m just urging business leaders and the communicators who support them to try a little harder to be personal when it comes to communicating important news. Hold your managers accountable. Arm them with information and ask them to meet with their teams. If they want to reinforce key messages by email, that’s fine – as long as they are making the effort at face-to-face communication as a rule and not an exception.

The healthcare subsidiary president has quite the challenge ahead. He’s got to get a change-resistant organization to either accept change or fall further off the pace in a highly competitive business environment. Do you think he has a prayer if all he does is send out an email in hopes that people respond? Neither does he.

Memo to all companies: Mind Your Business! That was my first reaction today when news of Deutsche Telekom’s spying surfaced. Clearly, electronic communication in an increasingly networked world leaves the option to track and trace extremely accessible. But just because companies can doesn’t mean they should. And so Deutsche Telekom is learning this lesson the hard way like HP a couple years ago. If there is a need to eradicate a harmful business practice, launch a formal investigation. And use legal tactics to gather evidence of wrongdoing. Both rules of thumb are also applicable when using technology to investigate suspicious employee activity.

If there’s one thing I consistently hear from our clients, it’s that employees feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they get at work, especially emails. A new survey by Lexis-Nexis drives the point home: more than seven in ten workers in the U.S. feel swamped with workplace information, while more than two in five feel they’re headed for an information “breaking point.”

Some companies are tackling the challenge by going directly to employees: U.S. Cellular and others have instituted “no e-mail Friday” programs. The CEO of another firm requested his employees stop cc-ing others when sending out e-mails and always put phones and PDAs on silent mode during meetings.

While these solutions might work to some degree, in my opinion the problem lies with the message senders, not the receivers. Are we as professional communicators enabling information overload in the workplace? Just because we get paid to communicate doesn’t mean we have a free pass to add to the noise. Smart communicators have evolved from being mere information producers to information stewards, channeling the right information to the right people at the right time and leading employees through the noise to what they need to hear. It’s not about yelling the loudest, but knowing who needs to speak up and who needs to quiet down.

How do you manage information overload in your workplace? Post your comments below.

I’ll be the first to admit that it takes about 24 hours for my wheels to get spinning following the weekend, but by Tuesday I’m full speed ahead. Turns out I’m not alone: I ran across a recent survey that concludes Tuesday is hands-down the most productive day of the week for employees. Fifty-seven percent of respondents (150 senior execs from some of the nation’s largest companies) put the second weekday at the top of the list, with Monday a distant second at 12 percent. Not surprisingly, Friday was the least productive, with 3 percent.

So when’s the best day to distribute broadcast email communications to employees? Is it better to send on the day they tend to accomplish the most, or on the lazy days when they might be more prone to read non-urgent messages?

The answer, as always, is it depends. What’s the objective of your email? Is it to inform and educate? Then you might want to send when they’re more likely to have the time to read. Are you looking for an immediate action to be taken? Try Monday or Tuesday, when to-do lists are being put together and folks are getting things done.

Something else to consider: according to a study of approximately 100 million marketing email messages sent between in 2006, those received on Tuesday had the highest open rate (26.4 percent). Sunday was second best (25.9 percent). The worst day? Saturday, at 24.1 percent. Now you might think your employee communication emails are far different from run-of-the-mill marketing emails, but do your employees?