Personal technology and the workplace

This is an off-beat post for me but as I have mentioned before, I blog what I am thinking about.

Growing up, my dad wasn’t in constant contact with my mom or the family during the workday. He is a family physician and his office was about five minutes from our house. When dad was at work, he was at work and seeing patients. He came home every day at lunch time, ate lunch prepared by my mom and took a power nap. Like clockwork he woke up and went back to the office. Short of the house being on fire I can’t think of a reason as a child that I would have called him at work.

Today?

The amount of external contact is enormous in the workplace. I work in a primarily cubicle environment but even in my cubicle the world is present. With my blackberry at hand and a computer with a high speed internet connection (for those of you who are younger, there was a time when you could barely open a grainy photo via the internet, much less watch streaming video in HD on demand) I have access to the internet, email, text messaging, twitter, facebook, etc. I and many of my co-workers are constantly shifting between media, from work to personal email briefly back to work to checking a new text and back to work again. I often know more about what is happening in the sports world than I do about what is going on in the cubicle next to me. I knew within a matter of minutes that George Steinbrenner died this morning, long before I got home to read the newspaper or watch the news, before I could even hear it from a co-worker.

In my lifetime we have seen an enormous shift in attitude and technology in the workplace, a change that really bugs the heck out of older workers. Attitudinally speaking, not many people are interested in going to work, hunkering down for eight hours and being disconnected from the world. We want to stay as connected as possible. Employers used to issue stern warnings about making personal calls on company time. Ha! Those warnings don’t seem to be all that relevant these days when you can surreptitiously send text messages from your tiny cell phone all day with no one the wiser.

A lot of this has to do with having both parents working. The moms I work with especially seem connected with what is going on at home or daycare because that is where their kids are and they are constantly communicating via phone calls to their cells, texting and emails. I am pretty connected with home but not nearly to the extent of some of my co-workers because my wife is home with my kids and I know where they are and who they are with virtually all of the time. With both parents so often working and with the insanely busy schedules most families seem to have adopted, it is hard to even keep track of who is supposed to be where each night.

This has to have an impact on productivity and I assume it is a negative impact, although I have not seen any studies to that effect. When you have all of the distractions available to you it intuitively is going to make one less productive at work. On the other hand perhaps it is not as bad as it might seem. Many workers today can multi-task like crazy. Most of us where I work have dual monitors and I often have half a dozen things I am working on simultaneously spread over two screens. I am not a text message person but lots of my younger co-workers are and they can text and read a work email and answer the phone all at once.

How much of a bad thing is this? If it is bad, is the technology to blame or the culture? Is the problem the temptation of technology or is the problem that workers, especially younger ones, see having a job as an onerous burden instead of being glad to have one. Work is something to escape from and now we can escape from work without leaving the building!

Perhaps the issue is not so much of a productivity loss as it is of barriers dropping. While it is true that the outside world intrudes into the workplace it is also true that with laptops, remote access, blackberries, etc. the workplace intrudes into the outside world. I always take my blackberry on vacation so I can stay ahead of problems and keep up on email. It makes a vacation less stressful for me to know that there are not going to be any huge headaches for me when I get back and that I won’t have 500 emails to sort through. The dividing line between work and personal is pretty blurry these days.

What do you think? Lots of tech lovers read this blog. Is the advent and availability of personal technology a net positive or negative for the work world?