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Not Using Smartphones Can Improve Productivity By 26%, Says Study (business-standard.com)
Smartphones do a plethora of things for us. But if you stopped using them, you might actually start seeing improvements in the work you do. From a Business-Standard report: The study, commissioned by Kaspersky Lab, showed that employees' performance improved 26 percent when their smartphones were taken away. The experiment tested the behaviour of 95 persons between 19 and 56 years of age in laboratories at the universities of Wurzburg and Nottingham-Trent. The experiment unearthed a correlation between productivity levels and the distance between participants and their smartphones. "Instead of expecting permanent access to their smartphones, employee productivity might be boosted if they have dedicated 'smartphone-free' time. One way of doing this is to enforce rules such as no phones in the normal work environment," says Altaf Halde, managing director, South Asia at Kaspersky Lab.
Whenever I am directing a commercial piece, there is always some production assistant or intern NOT paying attention because they just gotta upload this snapchat! Rubbish brains the youth have.
I wouldn't mind if we combine
a) Taking a way smart phones during working hours.
b) Working hours are limited to 35 hours a week (40 hour week with an hour for lunch & breaks each day).
c) Any employee not allowed to use a smart phone during work can't be required to use a smart phone for work outside of working hours.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Maybe I'll focus on productivity more when my salary is based not on the time I spend at work but on what I produce. Until then, I'll happily keep getting paid for drinking coffee, pooping, and smoking.
Instead, companies could set reasonable standards for productivity and discipline those who don't meet them. It doesn't matter if an unproductive employee is unproductive because they are on their phone, or because they spend too much time at the watercooler, or because they are just pretty bad at their jobs.
Seems like this sort of micro-management is more likely to hurt productivity than to help it. Just let your employees do their jobs, and if they can't do their jobs replace them with someone who can. (and if you can't find someone who can do the job, reset your standards to be more reasonable.)
Flashback to the 80s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they took away copies of "PC Week" tabloids and stopped people from running "Tetris". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 90s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access the World Wide Web and stopped people from running "Doom". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.
Flashback to the 00s: Worker productivity temporarily increased when they didn't let people access Napster and stopped people from running "Quake III". Workers eventually found other ways to kill time.