The BlackBerry Blackout? - [website] Published: 7th of Mar 2011 by: (c) Staff Training Reporter
Does having a BlackBerry make your staff less productive?
Is the fact that your employees can update their Facebook status, reply to an sms and upload a picture to Flickr all before they’ve finished taking a sip of coffee in the morning becoming a hindrance in the office?
There has been much debate over the past few years as to whether Facebook should be allowed in the office at all, and many businesses subsequently blocked the popular social networking site to prevent staff from logging on.
But things are changing now and employees no longer need their desktop computers to get their daily (hourly) fix of Facebook, with BlackBerrys and other smartphones emerging as powerful social tools that have rendered the PC redundant for this function at work.
However, BlackBerrys are not only useful for the social side of things and many employees use its emailing capabilities to send and receive messages even when out of the office.
This, looked at in light of how often we check our emails (and Facebook and Twitter and so on and so forth), may mean our staff are actually putting in more hours than we expect.
This will differ from business to business as well as from employee to employee, but according to a survey of 600 people conducted by employment law firm Peninsula in the UK, employees using BlackBerrys at work were actually working an extra 15 hours a week due to their constant monitoring of emails etc.
South Africa has always lagged slightly behind the UK and USA in terms of technology, but according to an article on Gadget.co.za the new BlackBerry Bold has now been made available in SA, making keeping up-to-date and in touch even simpler.
So what changes will the introduction of BlackBerrys and smartphones have on our working world?
Well, I think it’s a bit optimistic to assume that productivity’s going to climb by 15 hours a week, but the survey does suggest a positive trend in employees’ work habits – even if they are spending some of their time on their phones at work.
It would be interesting to find out as an employer how much time is being spent on your staffs’ BlackBerrys at work for personal reasons and how much time is used at home for work purposes.
Who knows, maybe the BlackBerry will be made mandatory at work when the figures are in?
