Grimsdyke Consulting

BlackBerrys on holiday – where do you stand?

// August 23rd, 2010 // No Comments » // BlackBerry

It being August, there’s been a fair bit of coverage lately of the pros and cons of keeping up to date with your emails while on holiday. No prizes for guessing where I stand.

The FT recently asked a panel what they thought with Sir Martin Sorrell weighing in heavily in favour since clients don’t switch off so why should we? I agree that the pressure is greater in a service business but do we really serve clients better by being on top of our emails even on holiday? I don’t believe so and there was a persuasive experiment by Perlow and Porter written up in the Harvard Business Review of October 2009 titled “Making Time Off Predictable & Required.” This showed that a management consultancy was regarded by its clients as delivering a superior service when its consultants spent some quality time outside the office and not checking emails.

I think it’s a real pity if organisations are now putting pressure on staff to stay on top of their emails while on holiday. It really diminishes the benefit of getting away and for the family it should be a precious period without the intrusion of ubiquitous email devices. When I have run training sessions on managing email, people always make the point that they feel less stressed when they stay on top of emails when on holiday. They pour themselves a glass of wine, they tell me, and spend no more than an hour keeping on top of things. It strikes me that there is always a glass of wine as if to convince ourselves we aren’t working. Of course, we are and the likelihoold is that most of the messages are mundane. The fact is, the anxiety caused by our awareness of an overflowing inbox is greater than the aggravation of dealing with them while away or the disapproval of partner and kids.

We are starting to see more scientific research into the impact on our cognitive ability of constantly checking for messages – and the benefits to our deep thinking capacity of simply unplugging for a while. There was a timely item on Fox News in the US this week in which some neuroscientists went off into the outdoors without their BlackBerrys – watch it here. It’s only 3 minutes long – see if you can get through it without checking for messages….

Chicago cop sues for overtime on BlackBerry

// August 5th, 2010 // No Comments » // BlackBerry

I spotted this article in the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this week. A “superstar” cop has sued over two years of overtime on his BlackBerry. An arbitrator specilaising in employee relations describes the BlackBerry issue as an “uncharted, undefined area” for many employers.

The irony of this is that sustained email checking via BlackBerry is not great from either employee or employer perspectives: if anything, it reduces productivity, is detrimental to work-life balance and crowds out deep thinking.

I expect we will see more of this in the US with the UK following suit a couple of years from now….

ILM research shows one third of UK workers work while on holiday

// July 29th, 2010 // No Comments » // BlackBerry

Sync my BlackBerry with my BMW?

// May 27th, 2010 // Comments Off // BlackBerry

Such is the demand from customers to eliminate all remaining aspects of life where it is not possible to receive email messages, BMW and RIM have joined forces to allow BMW drivers to see their inbox from the iDrive panel in their car. It’s a clever use of Bluetooth and you can see a demo of it on the Information Week blog here.

If you’re at all concerned about road safety, fear not as email messages are only displayed in full when the car is stationary. Once you are on the move, you can only see “From” and “Subject” – you then get the email read to you by a computerised voice. I for one think this is still a bit worrying from a road safety perspective – people taking their eyes off the road to look at their sat nav or radio generally do so at moments of their choosing. If you are overtaking on the fast lane of a motorway and, out of the corner of your eye, you see a new email from your boss with “URGENT!!!” as the subject, you may be fatally distracted as you reach for the “read” button.

Would you be happy about your child being given a lift in a car of which the driver was checking their email in this way?

Obama’s Cabinet Leaves BlackBerrys at the Door

// December 15th, 2009 // Comments Off // BlackBerry

He may be going through something of a sticky patch but full marks to the President for requiring his Cabinet members to leave their devices in a basket by the door (one blogger suggested we should call this basket a “punnet”). You can see them doing this about two minutes into the White House video released yesterday and linked via Taegan Godard’s Political Wire blog. If you watch it to the end, you’ll see some members even forget to pick them up afterwards.

If the President can do it, why should we not make this practice common courtesy at all meetings?

Dopamine and the Brain’s Hunger for Novelty

// October 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // BlackBerry

A really interesting post on Huffington by University of Texas neuroscientist Russell Poldrack throws a lot of light for me on the acitivity in the brain that drives so-called “addiction” to BlackBerrys and other PDAs.

Poldrack makes the point that dopamine is widely mis-conceived as a “feel-good” neurotransmitter when it is really a “gimme more” neurotransmitter. He cites some research involving rats are turned into slackers by blocking their dopamine.

Why should getting an email activate dopamine in the brain? My take-out from Poldrack’s post is that it’s about novelty. As he says himself, “from an evolutionary standpoint, we don’t want to spend all of our time and energy noticing the many things around us that don’t change from day to day.”  There are also compelling evolutionary reasons for us being rewarded for finding new information; in the ancestral environment this might have identified a source of food or important gossip about someone in our social group.

So each time the BlackBerry flashes green or buzzes, we’re responding to the natural urge to see what’s new as it might be important. It invariably isn’t but that surge of dopamine can be very powerful…

BlackBerry Rudeness Reaches New Levels

// October 9th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // BlackBerry

I was struck by this article by Jill Haney on cincinnati.com as it tells the anecdote of two young salesmen having a meeting with a prospective customer. Since they had a well-rehearsed two-handed pitch, while one of them was speaking the other one was checking his BlackBerry for messages. When they switched, the other rep checked his iPhone. Haney also tells of a job candidate that went through an interview with his bluetooth earpiece still in place.

I have long been accustomed to the phenomenon of BlackBerry use by executives in meetings either with their peers or with people that are in some way lower in status (junior managers, suppliers etc.). What makes this anecdote interesting is that it suggests that the behaviour is now so entrenched among some young business people (the sales reps are described as “twenty-something”) that they perceive no rudeness or lack of civility. Presumably, they thought it quite natural to check for messages even in front of someone they were trying to sell to.

Haney explains this as “addiction” – personally, I don’t see addiction as a helpful way of approaching this behaviour but that’s for another post…

Senator on Blackberry during Obama Speech

// September 10th, 2009 // Comments Off // BlackBerry

Last night, President Obama delivered an important speech to the Senate on his controversial plans for healthcare reforms. Commentators including the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson have pointed out that the President’s job was made easier by the rudeness of some of his political opponents, one of whom shouted out “You lie!” at one point.

But it is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor that Robinson singles out for using his Blackberry during the speech. This behaviour is now commonplace for attendees of meetings and presentations when they should be paying attention to what’s being said in the room. I am reminded of research conducted by Glenn Wilson of Kings College, London University, who found that while nine out of 10 of his reseach subjects agreed that answering messages during face-to-face meetings or office conferences was rude, a third nonetheless felt that this had become “acceptable and seen as a sign of diligence and efficiency”.

How can something be perceived as both rude and acceptable at the same time? It surely has something to do with the perceived importance of the individual’s own messages and emails outweighing the possibility of social censure for rudeness. The persistent use of mobiles on “quiet” carriages in trains is an example of this.

There may be a groundswell forming against behaviour such as that of Eric Cantor – Luke Johnson writing recently in the Daily Telegraph announced that he was banning the use of Blackberries in all board meetings that he chaired. Good for him.

BlackBerry Bank Holiday

// September 7th, 2009 // Comments Off // BlackBerry

Two pieces of coverage caught my eye over the Bank Holiday Weekend, both with an interesting perspective on the world’s leading PDA.

Interviewed in the Sunday Telegraph, founding chief executive of Tullow Oil, Aidan Heavey was asked when he had last taken a holiday. Here’s what he said:

“It’s all work. I don’t relax. Haven’t you heard of a thing called a Blackberry?… I can’t turn off. I look at my Blackberry every 10 seconds. I check it when I’m going up in ski lifts and drive my playing partners mad by answering emails on the golf course. They’re the best and worst invention ever. They mean that you work 24 hours a day and you don’t get holidays. They’ve changed life.”

Read the full article here.

The second piece was from the US and featured Collete C. Young who has set up a company called ExecuMate which offers advice to domestic partners of top executives. Her advice to BlackBerry widows is as follows:

“As a spouse, you can’t say ‘Put that BlackBerry away.’ You have to know part of that life is they’re on 24/7.”

Both of these pieces are similar in that they appear to accept the inevitability of the 24/7 lifestyle and the inevitable intrusion of the implacable BlackBerry into life outside work. Of course, it need not be inevitable. With a combination of will, discipline and a number of pragmatic, simple steps, the BlackBerry can be retained as a convenient, labour-saving tool rather than something that ruins your life.