Arianna Huffington's experience made her tell her staff to turn off their phones outside work. More employers should do the same
Nowadays, the wafer-thin MacBook, the tablet computer, and the smartphone synched with office email are ubiquitous. An iPhone or BlackBerry is the dubious privilege of many an employee, coming as it does with the expectation that you will be perpetually contactable outside contracted hours. And as a social media presence becomes less of a bonus and more of a requirement for modern businesses, those people who exist behind the Twitter accounts of clients and the Facebook pages of conglomerates have to monitor international cyber-reactions long after they've left the office. These social media experts, after all, are usually young people whose jobs are more tenuous than those above them. If they don't put in the time, they find out all too quickly how dispensable they are.
But then there are those who turn their backs on this life altogether – such as a friend who moved to Australia today, in order to pursue "odd jobs and a life, rather than a career". She illuminated this decision with a story about a family holiday 15 years ago, when her mother had attempted to impose a no-office-contact rule on both herself and her husband: mobiles were switched off and computers were left at home in an attempt to stem the tide of 24/7 demands from colleagues. This lasted a mere couple of days before the hotel room phone started ringing off the hook. No wonder my friend grew up and opted out.
In light of this, what should we make of the seven deadly email sins, identified today by psychologists as behaviours symptomatic of internet addiction, that put us especially at risk of mental burnout? While emailing out of hours and responding immediately to email alerts make the list, so do automated replies and ignoring emails completely.
If you can't put on your out-of-office and can't leave the inbox to fill for any meaningful period of time, how are you supposed to heed warnings not to email out of hours? As usual, it's a massive contradiction: the same kind of contradiction that comes from taking a holiday while your iPad remains poised on the bedside table, permanently connected to the hotel's Wi-Fi.
One psychologist who worked on the study, commented that "many of these strategies can be detrimental to other goals and the people that we work with". The simple fact of the matter is that there is no need for most people to be on call 24 hours a day. Machines may be more portable and more connected nowadays, but we must resist the hyper-capitalist imperative to become at one with them. Research has shown that even the presence of a mobile phone in the room can reduce human interaction to a shallower level. Isn't that more terrifying than missing a list of numbers from the latest account at the New York office?
It's not just whinging pinkos like me who believe this. Arianna Huffington has been vociferous in the past in defence of the phone-free holiday and the email-free evening. At one event she held last year, she described to a room of female journalists, me included, how she began banning staff from answering work calls and emails out of office hours, following her 2007 collapse from exhaustion at the peak of her career. Shattering her cheekbone from the fall made her realise there was a problem in the industry, she said.
Until more business leaders like Huffington take on this approach, we can't expect to see a change in the status quo anytime soon. Most of them think they have a vested interest in keeping their employees glued to the screen, but talk of missing targets and distracting colleagues should make them take heed. While enforced internet addiction has been impacting our family holidays for years, perhaps now that it threatens business decisions, something may be done. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.
Nowadays, the wafer-thin MacBook, the tablet computer, and the smartphone synched with office email are ubiquitous. An iPhone or BlackBerry is the dubious privilege of many an employee, coming as it does with the expectation that you will be perpetually contactable outside contracted hours. And as a social media presence becomes less of a bonus and more of a requirement for modern businesses, those people who exist behind the Twitter accounts of clients and the Facebook pages of conglomerates have to monitor international cyber-reactions long after they've left the office. These social media experts, after all, are usually young people whose jobs are more tenuous than those above them. If they don't put in the time, they find out all too quickly how dispensable they are.
But then there are those who turn their backs on this life altogether – such as a friend who moved to Australia today, in order to pursue "odd jobs and a life, rather than a career". She illuminated this decision with a story about a family holiday 15 years ago, when her mother had attempted to impose a no-office-contact rule on both herself and her husband: mobiles were switched off and computers were left at home in an attempt to stem the tide of 24/7 demands from colleagues. This lasted a mere couple of days before the hotel room phone started ringing off the hook. No wonder my friend grew up and opted out.
In light of this, what should we make of the seven deadly email sins, identified today by psychologists as behaviours symptomatic of internet addiction, that put us especially at risk of mental burnout? While emailing out of hours and responding immediately to email alerts make the list, so do automated replies and ignoring emails completely.
If you can't put on your out-of-office and can't leave the inbox to fill for any meaningful period of time, how are you supposed to heed warnings not to email out of hours? As usual, it's a massive contradiction: the same kind of contradiction that comes from taking a holiday while your iPad remains poised on the bedside table, permanently connected to the hotel's Wi-Fi.
One psychologist who worked on the study, commented that "many of these strategies can be detrimental to other goals and the people that we work with". The simple fact of the matter is that there is no need for most people to be on call 24 hours a day. Machines may be more portable and more connected nowadays, but we must resist the hyper-capitalist imperative to become at one with them. Research has shown that even the presence of a mobile phone in the room can reduce human interaction to a shallower level. Isn't that more terrifying than missing a list of numbers from the latest account at the New York office?
It's not just whinging pinkos like me who believe this. Arianna Huffington has been vociferous in the past in defence of the phone-free holiday and the email-free evening. At one event she held last year, she described to a room of female journalists, me included, how she began banning staff from answering work calls and emails out of office hours, following her 2007 collapse from exhaustion at the peak of her career. Shattering her cheekbone from the fall made her realise there was a problem in the industry, she said.
Until more business leaders like Huffington take on this approach, we can't expect to see a change in the status quo anytime soon. Most of them think they have a vested interest in keeping their employees glued to the screen, but talk of missing targets and distracting colleagues should make them take heed. While enforced internet addiction has been impacting our family holidays for years, perhaps now that it threatens business decisions, something may be done. Reported by guardian.co.uk 8 hours ago.