The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors remained the same.
Now we read about a bold move by a company that has decided to take responsibility for this problem. Car maker Volkswagen has interrupted the flow of distracting messages at the source; they’ve disabled the move of email messages to the Blackberry servers 30 minutes after the end of formal work hours, and until 30 minutes before the next workday begins. This will bring about what I like to call a “Technology assisted behavior change”: one that uses a technological component to make it impossible to violate a required behavior.
It’s encouraging to see that Volkswagen values its employees’ Work/Life balance and is willing to take an affirmative step to protect their personal time. In addition to being the right and moral thing to do, it is a smart move as well – employees that can relax after hours with their families will be much more focused and productive at work. It’s a Win/Win, and I hope other companies will take note. The fact that they involved the employees in defining this move is significant and should help this succeed.
Let me know if your own organization would consider this!
An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today:
One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed:
I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time.
A lovely domestic tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload.
By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once a week to my Grandma’s home (she had the only TV set in the familt back then) to watch “The Forsyte Saga” on the single B&W channel available then. Television watching – for all its shortcomings – was at least about family togetherness in the days before email!
One affliction of the modern knowledge worker is that people don’t see their children: first, because they work late in the office; and then, because they spend their hours in the home clearing their email.
I was pleased to read in today’s morning paper, then, that the Israeli civil service is going to adopt policies that will mitigate at least part of this issue. A report whose recommendations were approved by the cabinet will make government employ more parenting-friendly. There will be summer camps for employees’ kids, there will be a move to output-based employee assessment (rather than time based), and what I like most – working parents will be allowed to leave at 3PM once a week to spend time with their children.
Of course, a lot depends on the details, which need to be worked out and implemented by a special committee – an inevitable but not always effective route. But if all goes well, one sector of workers in Israel will spend a longer afternoon with their families, and that is a really good thing. As to whether they’ll use the extra time to do email – well, that’s where I might come in… 
I had the pleasure of being interviewed for an article on Multitasking by Thea O’Connor, an Australian journalist and health promotion consultant. Of course I visited her web site and I discovered a refreshingly different campaign Thea is crusading for: the Napping Project. The idea being, that “napping is a refreshing and proven solution to tiredness in a time-poor world” – and thus, her intent is to establish the mini-siesta as a socially acceptable and valued practice in our personal and working lives.
At first glance sleeping on the job sounded weird, but then I realized that unless you’re a jet pilot (and possibly if you are too, and you have a copilot) that short nap may be an excellent idea. Not to mention that in today’s brave new world “On the Job” is increasingly fuzzy, thanks to the technology and other trends that did away with our work/life barrier. With Information and Work overload making us all increasingly stressed and tired, and work hours extending into the night, taking a 15 minute nap makes a lot more sense than guzzling another dose of Caffeine and trying to stay awake; and the outcome is sure to make us less stressed and more productive overall. For my part, I do take short rest breaks in the workday if I can; I’m considering going all the way and joining Thea’s project…
Of course, we need to learn how to nap – Thea says you should not sleep more than 20 minutes if you want to wake in an alert state, and many people may not be able to fall asleep in such a short time. My late grandfather, I recall, was definitely able to do it: a busy businessman, he had the capacity to sit in an armchair and fall asleep instantly for a few minutes before going into his next meeting or task; a skill I much envy. He also had an ironclad Work/Life barrier – I may tell you another time.
So what do you think? Would you promote a nap-safe culture in your workplace?
I was discussing the effect of email overload on work/life balance with a manager, when he pointed out that emailing late at night was acceptable in his eyes because if he receives an email from a subordinate at 10 PM the sender may well be watching a game on TV and “doing email”. I found this interesting because of the underlying assumption that if the poor chap was sending the email while watching the game then it was not a problem for his work/life balance, since he was, after all, watching the game – in other words, he had no right to complain, he was “having a life” after all!
This is a nice case of rationalizing the problem away by redefining expectations. In times past (and I’m not speaking of the middle ages; this was a few decades ago) one’s time at home was one’s own; if one did any work there it would have been perceived as a breach of the work/life barrier. You did work at the office, and you watched TV at home. Nowadays you work at the office without watching TV, and you work at home while watching TV. The manager I was talking to would probably consider it a poor balance only if one were to work at home with no TV at all…
And don’t get me started on the implied multitasking!
In the late nineties I found myself involved in a variety of Work/Life Balance initiatives at Intel. I had led Intel to adopt Telecommuting practices and although I’d proven that [one day per week] work from home had significant productivity benefits, the benefit for employees’ life was pretty obvious too. The ability to work remotely was clearly helping people balance their lives.
Then came a new decade, and with it the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless connectivity, and it became apparent that the same ability was being overused and abused by knowledge workers to the point that 24×7 work was clobbering their leisure, family life and – through mounting stress – their health. “Work anywhere” was beginning to look not so great for balance: back before mobile computing you went home and that was pretty much that as far as working that day. Not any more!
And yet, suggest to people giving up the ability to connect from home, and you may well have a mutiny on your hands. Part of the problem is that with many knowledge workers in global corporations, the realities of time zones require them to stay in touch with people during all hours; and as I discovered myself when still working in a cube farm, it is far less disruptive if you can go home, have dinner with your family, and then dial into a teleconference from home, than to stay in the office till late at night. Furthermore, until we find a cure for workaholism – don’t hold your breath on that one – people will truly benefit from the ability to engage with their workload whenever it suits them. I’ve seen this often: managers are eager to cure unnecessary overwork, by solving email overload and related problems, but they are sincerely in favor of allowing work from home after hours, because they see it as a flexibility benefit.
Given this situation, what we may really need to figure out is new and innovative ways to reduce stress and enable employees to live their lives well. We should assume that there will not be a clear work/life barrier like the proverbial 5PM one in the classic “9-to-5” workplace; accept that work and life will remain inextricably meshed in the foreseeable future; and move on to adapt to this state of affairs. What we may need is to extend “Work anywhere, anytime” to coexist with “Live anywhere, anytime”, with both halves of the equation having an equal footing.
What do you think?
Telemarketers are one of the annoyances we all live with, and contribute their part to the overall flow of interruptions that it damaging our ability to concentrate on what we want to do. I find it interesting that these days, at any rate here in Israel, these rascals are following in the footsteps of our work-related information overload into the evening hours.
Today I got two calls in my evening – one from a car rental company stating its desire to improve its service to me (actually, they simply wanted to verify my contact information) and one from a health provider whom I cut short before learning what they wanted. The first came at 7:12 PM; the second well after 8:00 PM. Someone was paying the poor agents doing these calls to work an after-work-hours shift so they could annoy me in my own after-hours time.
Many of us are used to take this kind of intrusion from our peers at work, unfortunately; but for our service providers to send total strangers to obliterate our private time really takes nerve. And why are they doing this? Obviously, because they figure that’s when they can find us at home, at our listed numbers that they dredge up from the white pages. It makes perfect sense – once society accepts that there is no such thing as a sacrosanct personal time. As our society, the world over, has done… 
We’ve heard how man-made noise pollution from ship propellers and sonar disturbs the lives of whales and damages their famous whale song communications. It seems that underwater distractions and interruptions are now destined to affect humans as well…
I saw this while flipping pages in the ubiquitous SkyMall magazine on a plane: an ad for a NEW! Underwater cellular phone system. It leads with the question “Have you ever wanted to make or receive a phone call underwater?” Why, of course! Happens to all of us, all the time! What the ad doesn’t ask, perhaps because it assumes this is a non-issue for the ordinary citizen, is “Would you pay $1790 to solve this nonexistent problem?”
Underwater Cellphone System ad
Note that they aren’t targeting James Bond type spies with special needs and budgets to match. This is for the man in the street, as evidenced by the statement that this is useful not only at a tropical reef, but also “in your pool”. Which would save you all the hassle of popping your head out of the water and picking up your cellphone where you left it on your poolside chair.
From an Information Overload standpoint, the tragedy is that you ought not to even take your cellphone when going on vacation in the tropics, much less be willing to answer it while observing the wonders of marine life. But then, if you did that how could your wife call you to ask that you pick up some calamari on your way up out of the depths?
Happy 2010, folks!
Today’s knowledge workers are normally assumed to be working on company business well after they went home for the night; they are always reachable by cellphone and email. Of course they could turn off their devices when they exit the office, but most are afraid to do so in case of a real emergency, which in our global economy can come at any hour and demand their attention. What can they do?
I was heartened to hear an original solution from a woman who juggles the tasks of managing a group in a high tech company, raising two kids, and having a life. She told me that she simply leaves her computer in the office when she leaves; her coworkers know that she never works at home. However, because her role does involve responding to urgent situations, she makes it known that she’s always available on her cell. But – and here is the twist – if anyone calls her with an urgent action item after hours, she tells them she has no computer with her, so she’ll be happy to drive to the office – which is not far from her home – and deal with matters there. Guess what: 90% of callers beg her to stay at home; the urgency suddenly evaporates and it turns out that the task can wait until morning.
What this smart lady did is put in a filter: she’s really willing to make the trip, but when confronted with this higher threshold of inconveniencing her the callers are forced to make a serious judgment call on whether their need justifies the intrusion. True emergencies make it through this filter; the rest are withdrawn.
Many lessons in this story!
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I was interviewed by a journalist about Information Overload recently and she asked whether I agree that having a smart phone helps people to balance work and home life?
My first reaction would be “yes, if you use it wisely”. After all, when we deployed Notebook computers at Intel in the mid-nineties it was eminently obvious that they can be a boon for one’s Life: instead of staying late at the office to finish your work, you could take it home to do after dinner, with the kids safely in bed… and of course, Notebooks enabled Telecommuting, which (at a carefully defined one-day-a-week rate) became a major improvement in WLB. Blackberries are just little computers, so wouldn’t they, too, improve the balance?
But on second thought, I had to admit to myself that that isn’t the case. Smartphones are certainly a good thing for many purposes, and they do allow you to remain connected in some cases that would otherwise require you to remain tethered to the office (even if only a home office). It’s easy to imagine scenarios where a Smartphone would give you freedom that you value as increasing WLB. Unfortunately, they can and do go too far, beyond the optimum; that is, any gain they provide in flexibility is offset by the constant intrusiveness and expectation of 24×7 instant response. These miracles of engineering bring powerful benefits, which I use and value, but their distracting impact is too damaging.
The sad part is, you could have the best of both worlds; all it takes is an intelligent strategy and the willpower to enforce it. My Nokia E71 is set up not to notify me of incoming email; that alone solves a large part of the problem. And I usually let it go to voicemail if it gets a call while I’m in a meeting. No rocket science is involved; you could do this today. You’d also need to make sure your correspondents and organization accept this behavior; once it does, you can have a Blackberry without impacting your Life and your Family’s.
One day I’ll tell you about that little switch with the magic symbol on it…
