The 74,000 employees of French IT firm Atos will no longer email each other to cut the time they spend in handling emails.

CEO Thierry Breton set an 18-month deadline to eliminate internal emails and require employees to communicate via instant messaging or Facebook-style interface.

The aim was to increase the staff efficiency as most of the average 200 emails received by Atos personnel per day are not useful or are spams.

Breton announced the zero email policy on February and Atos reduced the number of internal emails by 20 percent in six months, said company spokeswoman Caroline Crouch, according to ABC News.

Crouch said workers of Europe's largest IT services firm use the Office Communicator, the company's online chat system, which allows video conferencing, and file and application sharing.

Breton himself has not emailed anyone in the company since becoming its chairman and CEO in 2008.

"If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word," said Breton, according to Slashdot.com.

Atos provides IT consulting services, systems integration and managed operations, and transactional payment services to companies in 42 countries, according to Wikipedia. The official IT integrator for the Olympic games from 2002 until 2016 has an annual revenue of $6.77 billion.

ATOS chair and CEO Thierry Breton.