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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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