Several Australian companies have started banning internal and external emails in the workplace after they were found to cause stress and conflicts and slow work down.

Nathan Schokker, director of facilities management services provider, Talio said he banned emails between employees to promote more face-to-face communication.

"My staff are very energetic and tech savvy, being part of a start up. People were emailing on weekends, public holidays and any day of the week with ideas. While the ideas were good, it was starting to get tiresome," he said.

"People felt compelled to respond and we found confusion and implied tones of voice became irritating and bred a bit of conflict between people."

Mr Schokker issued a policy to his 20 staff members in Brisbane to only speak in person but continue to use emails for clients sparingly. His said self-governance policed the system.

"If staff members see an internal email, they will have a quiet word amongst themselves or they will choose not to respond at all. They are empowered to set their own boundaries," he said.

Emails with clients could also lead to misunderstandings - another reason why Mr Shokker has banned emails.

"We had a dispute with a client once and it erupted over email. I went to see them and said the same thing to them from the emails word for word and it solved the issue. Emails lead to a lot finger pointing," he said.

He also said he the work duplication was a waste.

"I also had to supervise conflict resolutions between employees which is another waste of time," he said.

Other companies such as Toowoomba training business, Fortress Learning, has banned employees from reading emails during their leave. Employees who fail to adhere to the policy are disciplined.

"It is not meant to be punitive. The intention is for staff to consciously remember not to check their emails and to go against their reflex action," Fortress Learning's managing director Bryan West said.

"We want our staff to be incredibly dedicated to us and equally so to their families."

The Australian Psychology Society had found one of the causes of work-related stress was "checking work emails at home".

American psychologists, Justin Kruger and Nicholas Epley found "people overestimate both their ability to convey their intended tone when they send an e-mail as well as their ability to correctly interpret the tone of messages others send to them".

In their research they found the reason for this is "egocentrism", a social phenomenon where people have difficulty detaching themselves from their own perspectives and understanding how other people will interpret them.

"Of course there's nothing new about text-based communication, people have been writing letters for centuries," Epley said.

"But what's different in this medium is…the ease with which we can fire things back and forth. It makes text-based communication seem more informal and more like face-to-face communication than it really is."

Director of digital website optimisation company, Quasion, Matt Braithwaite-Young has found a solution to this problem.

He and his five on-ground employees in Sydney and 15 employees overseas use instant messaging for internal discussions and emails for communications with clients.

He wanted his staff de-clutter their inboxes from one-line informal email chats so that they can quickly spot client emails.

Instant messaging also allowed his employees who already know each other to write to each other casually.

"There is a grey area about when emails should be informal. When you are aware of the social context, all that formal packaging around emails can be distracting," he said.

"I also had a melt down when I could not locate emails even with advanced searching tools. It is just so frustrating to know "it's in there somewhere" but nested into god-knows-how-many emails and folders," he said.

Mr Braithwaite-Young was not advocating the use of instant messaging over face-to-face conversations, but in certain circumstances, instant messaging could be faster than a short phone call.

"We are a digital company and sometimes all we need is a quick URL or a password, instant messaging does that," he said.

Quasion employees even have different channels of instant messaging from casual conversations to joke sharing.

While some might argue these companies have succeeded at email-ban because they are small, Talio's Mr Schokker said while it might take longer to implement, it was equally achievable at a larger company.