Coca-Cola Headquarters Disconnects Office Voicemail In Effort To Increase Productivity

Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta has done away with its office voicemail system, replacing the standard system of several prerecorded messages to contact a specific person with a standard outgoing message that urges callers to use "an alternative method," reports Bloomberg.

The change went into effect earlier in December, and an internal memo from chief information officer Ed Steinike reportedly announced that the decision had been made as an effort "to simplify the way we work and increase productivity."

The move is less a means of cutting costs (the savings are estimated to be less than $100,000 a year), and more a recognition of the company's younger and more tech-savvy workforce, for whom the usefulness of smartphones supersedes the old-school landline.

"People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voicemail," Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management's Center for Digital Business, told Bloomberg. "People under 35 scarcely ever use it."