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Mobile communications and work-life balance

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Tahlent Team

Mobile communications and work-life balance

If we view the growth of mobile communications with rose-tinted glasses, we cannot help marveling at how it has potentially improved productivity both at the workplace and outside of it. Business leaders love to push home the point that mobile communications have improved the work-life balance of their employees.

With faster communication and seamless collaboration, one assumes that core work gets done more easily, leaving more time for activities such as brand-building, employee skilling, etc. But is this really true?

Recently, the Kelly Global Workforce Index reported that in a global survey of nearly 100,000 people in 34 countries, about 92 percent of Indian respondents asserted that mobile communications have “boosted personal productivity” and “transformed work-life balance”.

Reading between the lines we realize that, in fact, mobile communications have altered the concept of “going to work” so dramatically that the boundaries between what constitutes “office” and “home” have been challenged.

“The line between work and personal life is blurring as employees are integrating information technology into their lives at many levels,” said Dhirendra Shantilal, Senior Vice-President (Asia Pacific) of Kelly Services. “Employers who use technology to enhance working arrangements are also likely to reap productivity benefits and to be seen as employers of choice.”

That last point is of utmost interest. Today, most companies – even smaller ones –are accustomed to working with international teams spread over different locations worldwide. It is not always practical in such a scenario to demand that employees report to the “office” or meet in a single conference room. By virtue of being connected over a virtual meeting space such as a conference call or an online chat room, the meeting is called to order.

Looking deeper, we see that modern “work culture” is more wrapped up in the nature of the work itself. It does not matter if one of the participants attends the meeting in his pajamas or her nightshirt as long as he or she participates and contributes his or her share. The beauty of the virtual office is in that its participants, despite not actually going to an office, are considered present and their work is deemed to be done.

More and more startups are working successfully with this model, registering significant savings on overheads and paying employees (as consultants) for the time they invest in working for them. The time and expense saved on commutes, coffee breaks and water-cooler gossip translates to money in the bank.

Larger, less nimble companies are slower to make the transition, although in philosophy and principle their management agrees with the notion of a mobile office.

This dichotomy is particularly applicable in the case the IT and BPO industry, where on the one hand, companies preach and even build mobile office applications for their clients. However, these companies face a huge internal challenge in implementing work-from-home policies for their employees.

Since they bill their clients on the basis of time and material, IT and BPO companies are hard-pressed to find appropriate ways by which they can capture, measure and communicate the effort invested by their employees. More so, they are challenged to find ways in which they can marry the time spent working (not necessarily equal to time spent at the office) to billable metrics. In such a milieu, HR resorts to a convenient, more measurable method of billing – enforcing strict office hours and mandating that employees register and record the time spent per task, and further insisting that employees spend a minimum number of hours at the office. However advanced the degree of automation in registering employee effort, it is only a vague approximation of the amount of time actually spent working. To boot, it could be a spurious estimate.

Employees often view HR’s billing policies as draconian and rebel against it by not being productive enough in the time they spend at work. This consequence, needless to say, is counterproductive to the best intentions of the mobile office.

Work culture has a lot to do with productivity, and mobile communications may or may not effect the required change unless fundamental cultural changes are in place at the workplace.

What HR really needs to do is be cognizant of the need for work-life balance and formulate policies that enable employees to work from home or from any other wired location at least once or twice a week.

While this will ease the strain on shared office resources such as transport, cafeterias, utilities, etc, it will also lead to better emotional health of employees. For instance, it is estimated that office-going employees spend at least 90 minutes a day on phone calls to their home or to family members.

Perhaps it’s time for a more probing study of mobile communications and their measurable impact on workplace productivity.

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