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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.
Didn't you know, that is how the authors of the study measured productivity.
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.
they won't work if they don't have access to social apps so they can chat and post kitty pictures!! Whatever will we do our business is doomed!!
... that people who have smartphones are on them all the time? I have a few, but I am only on them when I'm talking or texting, and in restaurants or waiting rooms, playing games. When I'm at work, I do my work, and the phone is just there to make or receive calls related to my work.
Similarly, when I drive, the smartphone is on driver mode, just in case I receive calls. Other than that, I don't use the phone while driving. I do use it when I'm shopping - either check out the store's app (like Costco) or check out my shopping list or prices.
And at home, I use it to FaceTime or WhatsApp w/ family.
I put my smartphone on silent and forget about during my work day. Mostly to conserve battery power as I use my smartphone on the express bus, reading The Wall Street Journal in the morning and an ebook in the evenings.
I use leechblock (firefox extension) and block my time-wasters (slashdot included) after 20 minutes every four hours. Has been working wonders for my productivity.
reason defies logic
I worked at a company before the dot com bust where the managers installed desktop monitoring software. One day my manager ran into my cube to inform me that I shouldn't be browsing Amazon on company time. Only then did he realized that I was eating a breakfast burrito and browsing the Internet on my break, which is acceptable under company policy, and I told him to bugger off. Most of the employees figured out that the company next door had an open wireless access point. Just about everyone got a wireless PDA to browse the Internet.
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.
You know... people did all those things before cell phones right?
Your business has a land line in every office if it requires no smart phones.
Combined with RFID tags, you don't even have to log into the phones.
I have friends who work for the government and they have no access to any kind of cell phones during the day and they do not appear to have stable locations while at work (swapping between lab, office, and a lab/plane).
My point was, companies ask for 65 hours a week of your time and then require you check email and be available for on-call 24/7 via your smart phone.
If they are going to cut your smart phone then they need to return you to normal working hours and stop calling you at 11pm.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
WHich is to say, ... or management could piss off and stop telling the huge majority of employees who don't hang on their phone all day how to live their lives.
If you have an employee who's goofing off or is otherwise incapable of ignoring his toys (you know, like posting rants to /. while compiling), then he needs some interaction with his supervisor. Banning everyone's access to their personal phones is just another of those "Zero-tolerance Policy" CFs that will never work.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
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.)
Of course, if you took away smartphones ...
I expect management to do that right before IT rolls out 2 factor identification. Or maybe I read too much Dilbert. :-)
I once bummed a ride from Tallahassee to Tampa with a client, and he asked me if I minded if he took a detour to see the "Fish Man". I thought he meant a fish-monger, but then he turned his car off the highway an drove it through a gap in the chainlink fence. We went up a dirt track through the scrub pines to a glade with couple of trailers -- one of which had no sides and was outfitted as a living room. There were chicken wire pens scattered around the compound full of empty beer and paint cans.
The "Fish Man" turned out to be fat, shambling, hairy mountain of a man. He was almost naked, and monochromatically red-brown: shoulder-length frizzy red-brown hair, sunburned skin with strawberry-blond fur, and red-brown denim cargo shorts. You almost couldn't tell where the shorts ended and his body began, except that there was no fur on the shorts and when he turned around he showed about ten inches of ass crack. It was about 10:30 in the morning and he was drinking his breakfast from a gallon screw-top bottle. From out in the forest came the sound of trees being cut down.
We were here because the Fish Man was an artist my friend collected. The people cutting down trees were his apprentices. They'd moved thousands of miles from their city homes to live in a squatter's camp and study under him. My friend handed the Fish Man $250 and got a fish sculpture in return, which he later explained to me was a terrrific deal because that sculpture would have fetched $1000 in a gallery, easily.
I'm not an art person, but even I could see the thing was a masterpiece; it was breathtaking. It wasn't exactly representational, you might even have called it a little cartoonish, but somehow he'd captured a sense of movement; it looked alive.
The Fish Man invited watch him turn a curved blank from a hollow cypress into another one, a process that took only about ten minutes because he did it with a goddamn chainsaw.
There's a lesson in this about powerful tools. They can't make you into anything you aren't already. If you're a genius, they allow you to express your genius faster. If you're undisciplined and lazy, they make you unproductive on a grander scale.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Who could have imagined that idiots who ABSOLUTELY MUST RESPOND TO EVERYTHING, OR LET THE WHOLE WORLD KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING THE INSTANT THEY DO IT, could have lower productivity....
I wore a pager at one job, and was paged, heavily. (Except for the two months there when I wore two pagers.) I would NEVER TAKE ANOTHER JOB that wouldn't pay me time and a half, at least, to be on call.
a) What do your friends pay you to be on call 24x7x365.25? Nothing? Then WHY do you have to respond *instantly*? (And if you're driving and doing this, I hope you run into a bridge abutment, and soon, before you kill someone else.)
b) This is the same as bosses telling you to multitask. That kind of multitasking, along with you idiots on your mobile devices, is also known as "thrashing", and no, you *ain't* up to snuff.
mark "why, yes, I have a flip phone. Why? So people can *talk* to me...."
The unproductive people probably have dull, monotonous jobs with little to hold their interest. It's no wonder their phones distract them. The same people pre-smartphone would have had all other manner of distractions, from books to puzzles to hanging out at the water cooler.
When I'm working on an engaging task, I don't notice the time pass and have zero interest in my smart phone. If I get stuck with a dull task, it's amazing how easy it is to reach for the smartphone and how I'll even read the clickbait just for the hell of it.
If work could be made more engaging somehow, there would be less distraction.
You could be in one place I worked. They decided to install an IronPort proxy. We all had Linux boxes in addition to our Windows machines. So we just installed Corkscrew to a remote host under out control. They'd get the DNS dips, but not the page traffic.
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.