GigaOM » workaholism

Can companies, or countries, make workers switch off?

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:01:05 +0000

Constant connectivity holds out the promise of location independence and virtual teams sourced from the best and brightest talent worldwide, but as we all know the ability to work anytime, anywhere also has its downsides. Knowledge@Wharton captured these nicely recently with a fictional but all too believable run down of a normal day in the life of a knowledge worker:

It is quitting time, and you know the drill. You grab your coat and slip on your Bluetooth for a quick call with a client on the commute home. You stop at the grocery store and, while you are in line, pluck out your BlackBerry to respond to emails. You arrive home, sit down to dinner and try hard to resist the flashing red light on your smartphone. Dinner is done: Time to check your email again, clear the dishes, and sit on the couch for some TV — with your computer on your lap, of course. Just a few last emails and then it is time for bed. You will soon wake up to do it all over again tomorrow.

The constant drip of communication in what used to be known as “off hours” is the subject of a lengthy article in the publication, which offers a run down of opinion on the issue out of the Wharton School. The piece asks: what’s driving our constant need for connection? What’s it doing to us and whose problem is it?

It kicks off with a list of high-profile companies that have recently done something to tackle their employees’ information overload, including French IT company Atos, Deutsche Telekom, Google and Volkswagen. From banning email to switching of BlackBerries after hours, these companies using various techniques to force staff to power down their devices – and their brains – for a much-needed rest. Countries are even trying to get hyper-connected workers to switch off – Brazil recently passed a law requiring employers to pay overtime when they ask employees to check emails or take calls out of hours. But experts from Wharton suggest that the problem runs deeper than a tweaking rules or policies can reach.

“These policies provide important signals about what the company stands for, but often fall short as workable solutions,” says Stewart Friedman, a Wharton practice professor of management. Why? Our communication addiction goes right to the heart of our most fundamental anxieties, according to Carolyn Marvin, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication:

We sometimes talk as if it’s technology that does it to us, that makes us this way. But the problem is deeper. Technology is just a very efficient way of implementing a view we already have of ourselves. That’s the notion that who we are is our ability to produce in the marketplace and constantly show that we are producing. Being a successful member of middle class society is showing our dedication to professional work and being available at all hours of the day.

And Marvin isn’t the only expert who feels that the primary combatant in the war against communication-induced burnout should be the individual, not the organization. Craig Chappelow, global portfolio manager at the Center for Creative Leadership, who also contributes to the Knowledge@Wharton article, puts the responsibility for policing boundaries squarely on the shoulders of “individual leaders,” who he says, should “model the kinds of behaviors they expect to see. It’s the boss who should be saying: ‘We’re better if we are not working all weekend long.’” And, he adds, this sort of policy should begin at home: “In my family, we have a rule: No BlackBerries until breakfast is over.”

Who do you think bears the primary responsibility for policing after-hours use of communication devices?

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Is remote work making Americans’ vacation starvation worse?

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:04:28 +0000

It’s the holiday season, so obviously Americans are taking it easy at the office in favor of shopping, spending time with family and friends and generally getting into the festive seasonal vibe. Or not, according to a recent survey, which finds we’re actually taking scant time to recharge at the holidays.

Flexible office space company Regus asked 12,000 workers in 85 countries about their intentions to work during the end-of-year holidays and found a few of the year’s biggest occasions aren’t enough to keep Americans away from the office (or their smartphones). The company found:

64 percent of U.S. business people will work during the last week of the year.
56 percent of those working during this time will travel into the office to do so.
Yet a hefty percentage of American respondents – 39 percent — believe workers will get very little done in this work time.

These numbers come on top of an another poll from RingCentral showing 70.4 percent of U.S. business owners, executives and independent pros surveyed expect to work more this holiday season than last year. Only 14 percent plan to take a real vacation, meaning a complete break from work, including work-related emails or phone calls. Filling in this dismal picture of vacation starvation is the annual doom and gloom from Mercer’s 2011 Worldwide Benefit & Employment Guidelines, which shocked exactly no one by showing workers in the U.S. have among the least generous statutory employee holiday entitlements (entitlements they don’t even take full advantage of).

What does this have to do with connectivity and the future of work? Simple: Constant connectivity and eroding work-life boundaries may be making it even more difficult for vacation-starved Americans (and even those in more vacation-friendly countries) to really get away. Just take the tiny percentage of workers RingCentral revealed will be taking a real vacation by severing their connection to work entirely as exhibit A. Add to these difficulties the seemingly endless pressure of a dire economic climate and the vacation complications caused by our increasingly international teams, which creates the need to decide which holidays, if any, remote employees are entitled to and you have a recipe for increasing levels of holiday deprivation-induced burnout.

Do you get the sense that our Americans vacation starvation is getting worse due to larger workforce trends?

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The dark side of mobile work: How can we resist its pull?

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:00:11 +0000

When iPass recently conducted in-depth research into how the explosion in mobile work was affecting workers, they found a stark divide in how the ability to get stuff done nearly anywhere and at any time affected people. Many responded, unsurprisingly, that the freedom to connect added several hours of work to their average week.

More surprising was how those additional hours affected people: About a third told iPass the extra flexibility (and attendant jump in hours worked) added stress to their lives; another third disagreed completely, responding that mobile work made them more relaxed. (It’s assumed the remaining third or so were about equally relaxed with or without mobile work.)

What’s going on here? Dr. Carolyn Axtell of the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield recently analyzed the numbers (and will be speaking about her findings at Net:Work), trying to sort out why some workers respond well to the connected lifestyle and some suffer. In the process, she identified three “buffers” that insulate connected workers from the worst effects of a constant connection to professional demands. She describes them as:

Achievement. Many professional workers are lucky enough to be in a position where they really enjoy what they do. They become truly involved and engaged in their work because their jobs provide challenge, recognition, financial rewards and even power. Their work is interesting and motivating and gives them a sense of mastery and achievement, and these characteristics are related to greater well-being and satisfaction

Control. Having greater control over setting one’s own schedule means that work demands can be moved around other obligations to a more suitable time. Research consistently shows that having greater control and autonomy is related to higher wellbeing.

Support. It might be that some of these mobile workers are able to work so many extra hours because they receive a lot support at home for childcare or household duties (e.g., hired help; a spouse who takes on the majority of the childcare duties) and they may also have more support at work (e.g., people to delegate work to). Certainly research has shown that professional managers who work long hours often have such support available. Research has consistently shown that having more support acts as a protection against the greater stress that can result from high job demands.

Certainly having a nanny or a spouse who is handy in the kitchen and willing to man the washing machine is helpful, but not something companies can be expected to provide. Nor are most organizations able to create a sense of achievement in a worker who feels his job is unimportant or uninteresting. But there are things organizations can do to help boost these insulting factors that keep employees safe from connected work stress, according to Axtell.

For example, organizations can allow workers “greater control over their ‘off-job’ time,” which presumably translates to not bombarding them with communications and requests at all hours. This also might amount to giving workers as long a lead time as possible before a task is due, so they can set their own schedule and won’t feel intense pressure to work all hours to meet a tight timeline.

Companies should also “ensure that employees have the right resources to do their job and have the necessary support to overcome obstacles.” This support can come in the form of concrete help like necessary training and adequate information, or as emotional support, such as providing opportunities for employees to bond and relax.

Finally, Axtell suggests managers explicitly encourage workers to set firm boundaries and find time to recharge. Rather than phoning up at 11 p.m. to ask about that meeting next Tuesday, bosses should, “encourage employees to maintain a boundary between home and work and not work excessive hours.”

Is this akin to expecting Darth Vader to ask Luke to stay away from the dark side? At the end of the day, whose responsibility is it to set work-life boundaries in a world of perpetual connectivity, the worker’s or the organization’s?

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Facebook just a healthier smoke break, says iPass

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:00:45 +0000

Just how ubiquitous have smartphones become among mobile workers? According to the latest quarterly Mobile Workforce Report from iPass, 95 percent of mobile workers have one.

That will come as no surprise to plugged-in professionals who have taken a look around at their colleagues lately (though the finding that, for the first time, iPhones have unseated BlackBerry devices as the top choice for respondents may come as happy news to Apple fans), but what impact is this near-universal adoption of smartphones having on knowledge workers’ lives?

In one sense, the impact is grim. The survey of 2,300 mobile employees worldwide found that many are giving up exercising and sleep in favor of a constant connection to work.

One in three respondents told iPass they sleep less due to work, with one in four mobile workers reporting less than six hours of shut eye a night
More than half exercise erratically or not all, and 60 percent of the loafers blamed work for their sedentary lifestyle

We’re also emotionally dependent on our gadgets; 59 percent of plugged in workers said they’d be disoriented, lonely or even distraught without their smarthphone.

But one thing smartphones aren’t guilty of, surprisingly, is being a major time suck. We waste only about as much time checking emailing and Facebook and handling technical hiccups than we used to spend on cigarette breaks when that was the most common office addiction: a measly 28 minutes a day.

So in the one column, we’re filling our lungs with fewer toxic chemicals and getting massive amounts of stuff done. But in the other, the new way of working means little sleep and next to no exercise.

Are we better off?

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Connected workaholism: global edition

Jessica Stillman — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:01:04 +0000

Being constantly connected to work via your laptop or smartphone has huge advantages. You can work from your home, the beach or the airport while you’re frantically running to make a meeting, and you can choose your hours and always stay in communication. But is there one crucial thing all-out gadgets don’t let us do — turn off? (We’ll talk more about the remote over-workers at our Net:Work event on Dec. 8, 2011.)

We’ve blogged about concerns that hyperconnected remote workers are more prone to workaholism and burnout before, discussing whether the tendency of plugged-in pros to struggle to define work-life boundaries is an artifact of the type of people who choose this lifestyle or an issue that’s actually caused by all of our gadgets. But whatever the cause of the problem, it’s apparently widespread.

A survey of 1,599 IT pros for the seventh edition of the Australian Computer Society’s Employment Survey found that techies from down under are working increasingly long hours.

The number of IT pros working more than 40 hours a week rose from 65 percent in 2009 to nearly three-quarters this year (74.9 percent today).
Of those surveyed, 21.3 percent reported working 50 or more hours per week compared with just over 10 percent in 2009.

Of course, some of this increase in working hours could be in response to fears about job insecurity brought on by the global financial crisis (though Australia has weathered the economic storm better than most). But speakers from the industry at Ne(x)twork, an Australian conference organized by Fuji Xerox to explore the future of work, blamed our increasing addiction to connectivity.

Scott Mason, the director of products, marketing and strategy for Optus Business, hoped for “a bit of a backlash. We are so ‘on’ all the time,” according to Beverley Head on ITWire. “Stressing this was a personal rather than Optus viewpoint Mr Mason said that in the future people might come to question some of the health impacts of expecting employees to be available for work around the clock,” she writes.

“There may be a time when we all have to have some specific downtime,” Head reports Mason remarking. And Beth Winchester, the executive general manager of human resources at Fuji Xerox, apparently agreed, saying, “I have more requests about how to help stop people working than to start working.”

And it’s not just Aussies who are apparently suffering from connectivity-induced workaholism. Together flexible-office company Regus and Mindmetre recently asked 12,000 businesspeople from around the world about their work hours and health, concluding in the process that stress from overwork is “the twenty-first century Black Death,” particularly for remote workers. And they have the numbers to back it up:

Fifty-nine percent of remote workers take work home with them over three times a week, compared with only 26 percent of fixed-office workers.
Forty-one percent of remote workers work a 50-hour week, compared with 41 percent of fixed-office workers.
Fourteen percent of remote workers say their average working day is eleven hours or longer.

Do you think a similar survey focused on American workers would find plugged-in pros working equally long hours in this part of the world?

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New research on web work and workaholism under way

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:02:26 +0000

Does web work promote workaholism? It’s a question we asked a few weeks ago on WebWorkerDaily, prompting plenty of strong opinions from readers, many of whom had seen their working hours slowly encroach on their family time. The post quoted a pair of experts who were concerned about the issue, but no specific academic research. Apparently, now some is in the works.

Jay Mulki, a business professor at Northeastern University, has been studying the issue, conducting surveys of telecommuters and is currently analyzing the results. In advance of the release of the research, Mulki gave a sneak peak of his developing findings to the University’s website. Based on what he says, workaholism and web work are likely to be linked. He said:

As expected, remote work and telecommuting increased productivity for the business and provided flexibility for the employee. But we’ve found people often have difficulty getting away from work, and as a result, the work-family balance may actually be getting worse. Some people can manage it, while others can’t and often experience conflicts in their work and life. In the second part of our study, we are actually looking at whether the work-life balance is real or a myth, and how managers can help employees achieve this balance.

Rather than a challenge solely for the web worker, Mulki went on to say that this was an issue for managers to tackles as well as individual team members:

Smart managers are directing their people to have the discipline to start and stop work at specific times. They are also encouraging them to set up their workspace as if they are in an office setting. There are times when all employees will put in extra time, but we’ve found that some teleworkers feel obligated to work more hours and worry they can’t disengage from work. They are feeling that the work is always there.

As the manager of a dispersed team, do you feel it is your responsibility as well as your employees to ensure they draw a firm line between work and the rest of their lives?

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Is workaholism killing your creativity?

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:05:08 +0000

Recently we asked if web workers are particularly susceptible to workaholism. Opinions certainly differ on the question, but what if the hypothesis is true and, as some experts fear, there’s an epidemic of work addiction in the web worker community?

If you asked Brian Eno, he’d almost certainly answer that web workers are killing their creativity with their always-on mentality. According to a fascinating piece in 99% recently, the legendary musician and producer is a big believer in idleness as an essential ingredient in innovation – whether you’re writing a song or an iPhone app.

The article delves into Eric Tamm’s book, Brian Eno: His Music and The Vertical Sound of Color, and surfaces with insights from Eno on the magic that seems to happen during down time:

It quite frequently happens that you’re just treading water for quite a long time. Nothing really dramatic seems to be happening. … And then suddenly everything seems to lock together in a different way. It’s like a crystallization point where you can’t detect any single element having changed. There’s a proverb that says that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, but it falls suddenly … And that seems to be the process.

If you’re not an Eno fan and are ready to brush aside worries about what your workaholism is doing to your creativity, than be aware that the connection between lazing and inspiration goes back to Archimedes in his bath, passes through loafing enthusiast Walt Whitman and counts John Cleese as a contemporary standard bearer. Here is the Monty Python comic in a hilarious video backing up Eno’s claim that excessive busyness will destroy your capacity for creativity:

As a side note, Eno is also, apparently, a big believer in structured creative process and for those who are looking for ideas to refine their own, the 99% piece has a grab bag of great tips.

Do you worry that your tendency to be always-on is having a negative impact on your creativity?

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Workaholism: an occupational hazard for web workers?

Jessica Stillman — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:08:01 +0000

Among the joys of web work is the freedom to create a more porous boundary between your personal and working life. Need to pop out to take your kids to swim lessons in the middle of the day? If you’re a web worker, that’s not a problem. Or conversely, if you have a huge deadline looming, you can say goodnight to your better half and pop open your laptop to get an extra hour of work in.

The benefits of the blurring of these boundaries are obvious, but less discussed are the downsides, and several experts feel that there is at least one serious one: increased workaholism and the potential for burnout. Does being on the cutting edge of connectivity and evolving workstyles make web workers more vulnerable to becoming workaholics? Paul Miller, the founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, definitely believes so. He told WebWorkerDaily:

One of the downsides of the digital workplace is addiction to work. Companies are actually facing the opposite problem of the one they thought they’d have, which is that people would essentially not work hard enough. They actually overwork. You’ve seen it all around — people are working on holiday, working in the evening, working at the weekends. People are working much longer hours and seeing this blurring of work-life as being a positive thing, where I actually don’t think it is. I think it’s really important to know when you’re working and to know when you’re not working. If you’re using the same device for work as for talking to your mom, you start to forget which bits are work and which bits are the rest of your life. And actually I think people are becoming addicted to being connected.

Miller isn’t the only one with this worry. Contacts organizer Gist has been promoting the concept of a new workstyle that blurs the boundaries between the personal and the professional, but it’s not a change that comes without pitfalls, according to Gist’s VP of Marketing, Robert Pease. Technology and the workstyle it enables provide great benefits, but they also put significant demands on our maturity and self-control. He told us:

Web workers are very innovative people and they’re very into new stuff. You can get an activity stream of your friends, your favorite brands and your customers, and everything becomes almost overwhelming. It’ll be interesting how the web worker on the front edge of this is going to evolve to have a true on/off switch — to know that it’s OK not to be watching everything every second of every minute of every day.

You can very easily sit online 24 hours a day. As much as you’re willing to consume can be delivered. You can always pick up your phone and you can always see your messages. But you also have the ability to not pick up your phone. What that requires is a level of self-awareness and a level of maturity, for lack of a better word, to know that work is always going to be available to you, but you need to balance fulfilling things in your life than are not related to being online — running or hiking or time with your children or throwing a ball with your dog.

Of course, correlation is not causation. So perhaps rather than web work turning people into workaholics, it’s simply that ambitious, workaholic types are more drawn to web-work-style jobs in the first place.

What do you you think: Are web workers more likely to struggle with work addiction? Is this because of their basic character or the nature of their workstyle?

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