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Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity
MojoKid writes "Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine conducted a telephone study by
randomly surveying individuals employed full-time who use computers in an office environment at least five hours per week. They netted 912 respondents, of which 29.8 percent claimed to use IM in the workplace 'to keep connected with coworkers and clients.'
Neither occupation, education, gender, nor age seem to have an impact on whether
an individual is an IM user or not. The study theorizes that using IM enables individuals to 'flag their availability.' Doing so can limit when IM interruptions occur. Even if an IM interruption comes when it is not necessarily convenient to the recipient, it is 'often socially acceptable' to ignore an incoming message or respond with a terse reply stating that the recipient is too busy at the moment to properly respond." Also another study recently found that water is wet, and a third study found that most studies waste money.
So while you may dismiss this as the painfully obvious, at least I'll have something to shut down the baseless claims that a lot of good useful tools today "make us stupid." It's still possible for something to make us both more productive and stupid but at least there's some evidence supporting instant messaging in the workplace.
Waste of money because the sample size was too small? Maybe. Blatantly obvious? Not even close. I personally know several people at my company that still view it as a waste of time instead of a useful tool. It's sad that so many great software tools get bad reputations because there are fringe cases of abuse.
My work here is dung.
The only result of this study is the knowledge that a percentage of the people who use IM believe it to be "productive". It has no actual proof that the activity of IM actually increases productivity in a measurable way.
I've dealt with a lot of people who think IM makes them productive, and I tend to disagree.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Just because it's obvious to you, that doesn't mean that everyone knows it.
Hell - just because it's obvious to you, that doesn't mean it's true!
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I have speech and hearing impediments (born with them), so verbal communications in person and on telephone is sometimes impossible. IMs (and e-mails) are life savers. I am not sure how I would be able to work if I didn't have these technologies (same for the Internet -- addicting too!).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have also limited checking emails to 3 times a day. If there is an emergency, there is a phone and you can stop by my cube.
Hell, I even IM the guy in the next cube when he's on the phone. It seemed odd at first, but for important issues with simple yes/no answers, it can be really effective.
if you only allow some users to be able to contact you, such as your team members. Otherwise it becomes a major distraction and a waste of time and energy. It's way too easy for people to contact you, say whatever they want without talking to you or seeing you, and keep the written trail to blame you afterwards. If you lose focus dozens of times per day just because it's too easy for someone to ask something that's not really that important, but since it's so easy to contact you they ask anyways....it's not worth it being online.
I like the idea of instant messaging but I prefer e-mail to IM. Reasons? Overuse of IM lingo, short answers to complicated questions and the non-business tone of the exchange.
has not been invented. Not only does IM constantly interrupt your train of thought and derail productive activity, but it also sucks down minutes and minutes when a 15 second phone conversation would do.
Most technologies eventually find their useful niche, like text messaging being great when you're in a place where it's either too loud to hear a phone call or when breaking the silence would be rude. But IM, despite having been around since the earliest days (I remember using it with a friend in the early to mid-80's), seems to have persisted because it's what people do when they want to procrastinate.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
You are the first person who made a distinction between general and corporate IM. In most places that I have worked the exact held true: Employees on public IM systems do get interrupted and it does screw with productivity. Employees on internally hosted corporate (closed) IM systems (I recommend Jabber) do get more done. Especially in information industries, the ability to share small pieces of information very quickly without leaving your chair, code, scripts - availability - there is alot to be gained imho if your environment is controlled.
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
This is more of a survey than a study, isn't it?
I mean, they just asked people if it made them more productive. People aren't really going to have much of an idea about their productivity rates.
A "study" would be if they actually quantified and examined the effects on productivity with and without instant messaging.
Sent from my desktop computer
A toxic micromanager will do so with or without IM. Imagine the result if every "brain barf" had to be delivered in person, requiring you to turn from your task, take your hands off the keyboard and engage in an eye-to-eye conversation... Alt-tab or whatever a million times a day is significantly more efficient and less disruptive than having a formal real life conversation a few times a day.
I work for a 50,000 employee company that uses IBM's "Me too" chat system "Sametime". Most of the executives run sametime on their crackberry as well as on their PC, so they can IM in meetings, and request up to the minute stats and analysis when in an important decision making mode.
Some things are on-demand, and when I am doing risk management analysis for the Ceo while he is in a closed door meeting with the FTC, it is significantly retarded to expect him to say "Wait! I need to walk 1/8 of a mile down the hall to confer with my data analysts to ensure that I have my story straight"
There are jackasses with every technology, just because Assholes cut you off in traffic in their car talking on their cellphone listening to the radio, doesn't mean we should automatically become luddites about radios, cellphones, and automobiles.
Instant message is half way between a phone call and an email, and it is nice to have a middle ground that I can use without taking off my headphones, or averting my eyes from the familiar glow of my LCD.
Personal IM also eliminates the distraction of personal phone calls.
Spouses need to talk to each other about things sometimes. My wife has IM at her office and we chat from time to time during the day. It's no different than if she were to call me a couple of times a day, and is much less obtrusive to my work - she can ask me something that isn't urgent via an asynchronous mode of communication.
At my job before this, it was frowned upon to use IM for anything, though not actually blocked in a systematic way. Just due to the need for personal phone calls where an IM would be ideal, I was less productive. I find dropping everything to answer my phone and kick my brain into verbal mode to start talking to be much more disruptive to my thought processes than typing.
That said, a lot of geeks are simply prima donnas about being interrupted. If you're not thinking about a matter of life or death there is no train of thought that is too important to be interrupted; the interruption method is a non-factor.
and a third study found that most studies waste money.
Too true, and any introductory Statistics class will tell you that a phone survey, on it's own, is pretty much useless because your entire sample comes from willing participants in the survey.