Why smartphone culture reduces productivity

(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Your smartphone, with its pervasive email and texting capabilities, has made you available 24/7. Quite literally, anytime you're not actively sleeping, your manager, employees, clients, and partners can and do reach you. Popular wisdom says that this makes you more agile and your company more responsive. But is that what is actually happening? Is your business better or worse off for your all-encompassing connectivity? The Harvard Business Review contends that productivity is moving in the wrong direction.

In the forthcoming book, "Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work," Leslie Perlow makes the argument that productivity and effectiveness decline when you're never truly "away" from the office.

There's some data to back this up. When Perlow conducted some experiments into job satisfaction, 78 percent of the subjects were satisfied with their jobs when they were instructed to disconnect from work in the evening; 49 percent of those who kept checking and replying to email via the phone felt the same.

And it gets worse: customer satisfaction is lower as well. Ndubuisi Ekekwe, founder of the non-profit African Institute of Technology, relays an anecdote about how his organization decided to make the staff available 24/7 through smartphones. After six months, customer complaints were up, not down.

That makes some sense, if you consider the possibility that staff responded too quickly to issues, when they were tired and stressed. Without ever getting a chance to think through problems and find better solutions, they reacted to issues with the first resolution that came to mind, which is rarely the best.

In my own organization, we have a policy that managers should not send mail after business hours. The idea is that seeing email arrive at midnight sends the wrong message to employees that work/life balance isn't a priority, and, worse, that employees are expected to do the same in order to be perceived as team players. I've personally noted that morale and productivity seem to rise and fall over time as that particular policy is respected, neglected, and then re-enforced.

What are your own experiences with the always-connected corporate culture? Sound off in the comments.

[SmartassAcademy]

Regarding your post.. we made an experiment named Smartphone vs. Productivity on smartassacademy.com The TASK was to introduce a printed list of 150 contacts details (Name, Surname, University, Unique serial number) in electronic format. The subject was judged by the following criteria:1. Time needed to finish the task2. The number of mistakes made.

[cmonster100]

While I wholeheartedly agree that people should not be tethered to technology, I draw the line at telling them when they should send emails. People come remember things at different times of the day and night and relegating them to remember their thoughts until the next morning seems almost Orwellian. I say that everyone should be able to send an email whenever they want, they just shouldn't expect to hear an immediate reply.

[ming227]

thank you for this truthful piece, it expresses perfectly on how I feel about smart phones. Do agree having a smart phone does seem to tire me out more than if I didn't have one. Maybe that's why the older generation folks are healthier than our younger generation.

[ErikWood]

This reminds me of my friend who works at Wells Fargo. He told me that his team's meeting productivity would increase 40% or more if everyone wasn't texting and checking their texts during meetings. These same employees were guilty of occasionally checking texts while driving.

After my three year old daughter was nearly run down by a texting driver in 2009, I invented an app to manage texting whether the user is at home, in the office or on the road. OTTER (One Touch Text Response) has GPS road safety features and a silent texting Auto Reply with a timer and unlimited, grouped, customizable responses. Its simple and easy to schedule "texting blackout periods" so you can focus on the task at hand, like an important meeting - or anything like... watching a movie. Maybe technology can help us get back to doing one thing at a time with quality results.

Erik Wood, owner
OTTER app
do one thing well... be great.

[Kristen_94103]

Hi Dave,

Great that you are bringing this book to the forefront of our culture as it's a very real problem. It can be very scary how being constantly accessible actually degrades our ability to use our brains to the fullest capacity. Mashable just posted an infographic that talks about how people multitasking have less "white matter" the substance that transmits signals around the cerebrum - basically everything linked to emotion, memory, sensory and speech. Sounded to me like we are becoming shells of what it means to be human. It noted from a health perspective, heavy internet users are 2.5 times more likely to be depressed! It's no longer an issue of customer satisfaction, figuring out how to unplug is a survival skill. At my company we try to help people at least unplug from their inboxes, by escalating urgent messages to their mobile devices. This keeps them from constantly checking email, but relieves the stress of thinking they'll miss something important if they aren't connected. It's called AwayFind because we want to encourage people to get away, and if it's actually important, we'll find you. Let's stay on path with finding ways to discipline ourselves against the incredible technology we create, before it gets the best of us. Are there any solutions you can share from Ms. Perlow's book that discuss staying connected and getting away?

[BizHacks Dave]

Thanks, Kristen. I do plan to write a follow-up to this post in the future, and include an interview with Leslie.