Posts Tagged 'Work/Life balance'

Wrong solution?!

Posted on April 4th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was talking to a young manager in a hi-tech company and she shared an interesting insight. She had recently been equipped by her company with a Smartphone, and it had decreased her stress level at home significantly, she happily stated. Why so? Because, she explained, she was no longer afraid to miss out on anything – she could check her email during the evening as often as she wanted in order to see if anything urgent had come up. This is very interesting: before the arrival of the always-connected device, she couldn’t be connected – nor be on call.. Read more

Volkswagen shields its employees from its own Blackberries

Posted on December 24th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

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.. Read more

A sad vignette of family life in the email era

Posted on May 5th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

Go home to your children!

Posted on March 1st, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

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),.. Read more

The napping crusade

Posted on July 13th, 2010 · Posted in Individual Solutions

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.. Read more

The shifting perception of the acceptable

Posted on April 14th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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.. Read more

Work anywhere: is it good or bad for balancing our lives?

Posted on March 28th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

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.. Read more

Telemarketing and Interruptions

Posted on January 7th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

And now, Undersea Cellphone Interruptions

Posted on January 2nd, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

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.. Read more

Screening after-hours interruptions

Posted on December 17th, 2009 · Posted in Individual Solutions

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.. Read more