Smartphones are enormously valuable for helping people to fit work
activity into times and places outside of the office. Late-night
smartphone usage cut into sleep and made people tired in the morning,
and that, as a result, they were less engaged at work the next day.
PHOTO/FILE
Smartphones are enormously valuable for helping people to fit work activity into times and places outside of the office.
And
now that workers can access email and websites at any time from almost
any location, they can be responsive to professional demands in ways
unimaginable just a few decades ago.
Customer-centric
organisations can remain attentive to clients’ needs around the clock.
Time-critical events can be addressed quickly. People can leave their
offices without fear of being disconnected from their work.
Indeed,
many would consider smartphones to be among the most important tools
ever invented when it comes to increasing the productivity of knowledge
work.
Well, think again.
HIGH CONNECTIVITY COST
New
research indicates that greater connectivity comes at a high cost, not
just to the employee, but also to the organisation. Using a smartphone
to cram more work into a given evening results in less work done the
next day. The reason for this is that smartphones are bad for sleep, yet
sleep is very important to effectiveness as an employee.
That
a well-rested employee is a better employee is well established by
research. To note just a few recent studies, insufficient sleep has been
linked to more unethical behaviour at work, cyberloafing, work injuries
and less organisational citizenship habits.
Unfortunately,
smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep. Because
they keep us mentally engaged with work late into the evening, they make
it harder to psychologically detach from the most pressing cares of the
day so that we can relax and fall asleep.
More generally, they encourage poor sleep hygiene, a set of behaviours that make it harder to both fall asleep and stay asleep.
Perhaps
the most difficult aspect of smartphones to avoid is that they expose
us to light, including blue light. Even small amounts of blue light
inhibit the sleep-promoting chemical melatonin, meaning that the
displays of smartphones are capable of producing this effect.
Thus,
as researchers, we had good reason to suspect that using smartphones at
night would yield negative effects at work the next day.
Specifically,
we hypothesised that a greater number of minutes spent using
smartphones after 9pm would more negatively affect sleep; that this in
turn would leave people feeling tired in the morning; and that, as a
result, they would be less engaged at work the next day.
In
other words, using smartphones to squeeze in a bit more work at night
would lead to lower engagement the next day at work, through lost sleep
as a causal mechanism.
To test that hypothesis, we
conducted a pair of studies, which will be published in detail in the
research journals Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes
later in the year.
TIRED PEOPLE
In
our first study, we had 82 mid to high level managers complete multiple
surveys per day for two weeks. This entailed “within persons” analysis,
meaning we compared each individual’s daily data only to that person’s
own data on other days. This allowed us to examine daily effects,
unclouded by individual differences
.
.
Consistent with
our hypotheses, we found that late-night smartphone usage cut into sleep
and made people tired in the morning, and that, as a result, they were
less engaged at work the next day.
In our second study,
we had 161 employees from a broad variety of occupations complete the
same set of surveys, with the addition of late-night usage of
television, laptop computers and tablets.
The harmful effects of smartphones on sleep and work engagement held even after accounting for these other electronic devices.
Indeed, out of all those devices, smartphones were associated with the most powerful effects.
Our study adds to a pile of scientific evidence that managers must begin to acknowledge in their work.
There
are downsides to having employees use smartphones – direct ones for the
employees, and less direct but still troubling ones for workplaces.
Smart managers will look for creative ways to minimise smartphone
problems without giving up their mutual benefits.
One
solution suggested by the Harvard professor Leslie Perlow, based on her
research on high-end consultants, is to have predictable time off.
And
the best way to start is by agreeing that evenings and normal sleeping
hours are the most important times for people to be predictably “off.”
This will allow employees to psychologically disengage from work and
minimise exposure to the blue light produced by electronic display
screens.
SHAPING NORMS
Another
potential solution calls for creating new norms as to when employees
are expected to respond to work email and when they are not.
Leaders
should be sensitive to how their personal behaviours shape norms.
Employees will not feel pressure to check their mail late in the evening
if their bosses aren’t using that time to send messages.
A
handy tool is to set a delivery delay on email so that it arrives the
next morning. With this approach, managers who are travelling or working
odd hours can still communicate at their convenience, but minimise the
negative effects on others.
Written by
Christopher Barnes, an assistant professor of management at the
University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, Klodiana Lanaj, an
assistant professor of management at the University of Florida’s
Warrington College of Business Administration and Russell Johnson, an
assistant professor of management at Michigan State University’s Eli
Broad College of Business.
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