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Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jun 11, 2008 08:33 AM
from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
from the you-gotta-be-kidding-me dept.
MojoKid writes "Researchers at Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine conducted a telephone study by
randomly surveying individuals employed full-time who use computers in an office environment at least five hours per week. They netted 912 respondents, of which 29.8 percent claimed to use IM in the workplace 'to keep connected with coworkers and clients.'
Neither occupation, education, gender, nor age seem to have an impact on whether
an individual is an IM user or not. The study theorizes that using IM enables individuals to 'flag their availability.' Doing so can limit when IM interruptions occur. Even if an IM interruption comes when it is not necessarily convenient to the recipient, it is 'often socially acceptable' to ignore an incoming message or respond with a terse reply stating that the recipient is too busy at the moment to properly respond." Also another study recently found that water is wet, and a third study found that most studies waste money.
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Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:5, Insightful)
So while you may dismiss this as the painfully obvious, at least I'll have something to shut down the baseless claims that a lot of good useful tools today "make us stupid." It's still possible for something to make us both more productive and stupid but at least there's some evidence supporting instant messaging in the workplace.
Waste of money because the sample size was too small? Maybe. Blatantly obvious? Not even close. I personally know several people at my company that still view it as a waste of time instead of a useful tool. It's sad that so many great software tools get bad reputations because there are fringe cases of abuse.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:5, Insightful)
Get me percentages of business use vs. abuse before you start claiming these are "fringe cases." Claims like yours make for nice rhetorical arguments, but don't add any actual substance to the discussion.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Have you tried using IM with other developers who are more interested in developing than goofing off?
Actually, no--I've used it in in-house support and coordination until management blocked the server domain.
...we have a forum where people can share their own experiences....
That's the classical definition of "Anecdotal evidence," Fic. Great way to share experiences and advice--not so great way to generate statistical information.
I personally want to set up an in-house Jabber server for communication within our IT department. Having posts like the GGP calling abuse "fringe cases" would be an excellent argument to make to my bosses, but they want hard facts and figur
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:4, Informative)
The reason that it's often blocked -- and why it's officially blocked where I work -- is because of regulatory concerns over communications that have to be monitored. I've proposed a couple of solutions ranging from Microsoft LCS to Facetime's IM proxy/monitor to allow the environment to get the benefits of IM while covering the lawyers' concerns over risk. I've considered Jabber, but I have enough to do without being the only one available to support an IM server (even if it is relatively hands-off).
However, money is tight (we're a local government in California), and the chances of this happening are slim.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But like I said, I have enough to do without adding another server to my list anyway. Much easier to get another solution that someone else can handle.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like the problem you are describing is not one with your knowledge, but your personal frustration with your bosses who don't trust you at your word that employing technology X,Y, or Z will reap benefits. Bosses who will continue to waste your time until statistics and studies are conducted which will likely happen after we're already swimming in the sea of obviousness.
You need new bosses. Projecting your frustration upon the OP is misleading.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Fic--I was miffed at the claim itself, not projecting. The problem with the claim is that my experience leads me to believe that with Joe Schmoe Luser, IM tools are abused more often than used as tools.
Not all of us work in a development environment. Where I work, it's actually a small minority of people that are technologically adept enough to even know the difference between using IM and abusing it. OP's post may be an accurate assessment of IM tools in a group of professionals (actually, I'd hesita
u r rite! (Score:5, Funny)
So while you may dismiss this as the painfully obvious, at least I'll have something to shut down the baseless claims that a lot of good useful tools today "make us stupid." It's still possible for something to make us both more productive and stupid but at least there's some evidence supporting instant messaging in the workplace.
i no xactly wat u meen! pholks sa i'm stewpid for it an 4 posteing on sashdot! i haf to go bac and rite my web pag
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:5, Insightful)
Productivity and stupidity are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Plenty of moderately successful individuals are in the position they are now because they lack the excess brainpower to waste on ethics, logic, and other considerations that might hinder their productivity. eg: I'm sure many of us could churn out more code if we weren't smart enough to get bored.
Parent
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes hello isn't just a social extravagance.
http://www.esmerel.com/circle/wordlore/hello.html [esmerel.com]I don't think there's any argument for goodbye being a waste either. What are you going to do, just sit there with the receiver on your ear and timeout instead of knowing when to hang up?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I do not concur. (Score:5, Interesting)
The hardest most productive animals are usually nothing more than what we term "beasts of burden" under the direction of an intelligent being.
Cattle can work hard and produce a lot... yet the farmer is smarter than them (and often eats them when they're no longer productive), farmers are productive, but the workers in the city are 'smarter' than them, because they eat what the farmer produces but work half as much to buy what the farmer works year round to produce. Bosses are even less productive than workers, but they employ workers and milk them dry, making bosses "smarter" than employees. BANKERS are even smarter than all of them, because true bankers do not work at all, and fleece entire countries. In fact, through inflation and debt instruments, bankers produce POVERTY, therefore "negative wealth", and yet they make a killing (literally and figuratively) running entire nations into the ground, with the nationals' own consent.
Therefore, lets not pretend that what makes you smarter also makes you more productive. Harnesses may not make horses and oxen smarter, but they certainly become more productive. Being a "good" beast of burden is NOT a result of tools that make one smarter, but of tools that make one more "productive".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's still possible for something to make us both more productive and stupid but at least there's some evidence supporting instant messaging in the workplace.
I hate using the word productive because in most managers it engenders the false notion that all productivity involves physical activity. I have seen so much wasted motion because someone would rather look busy than do what was right (RTFM or do other research/design in preparation). As a software developer I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking - engaging my brain before my mouth or hands as it were.
Waste of money because the sample size was too small? Maybe. Blatantly obvious? Not even close. I personally know several people at my company that still view it as a waste of time instead of a useful tool. It's sad that so many great software tools get bad reputations because there are fringe cases of abuse.
Amen to that.
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Doesn't follow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've dealt with a lot of people who think IM makes them productive, and I tend to disagree.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it completely depends on the person. Where I work, the easiest to communicate with all use IM. Those that don't use IM really hinder my productivity at times, when I have to wait however long for them to reply to an email, or at worst trek around the area and physically find them.
When all you need is a quick yes/no answer when you're in the middle of some work, having to drop everything and move on to anothe
Re:Doesn't follow. (Score:4, Insightful)
(To my QA guys:) Maybe the fact that we're not available for your "quick yes/no" questions means we're in the middle of some work.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and?
Just because you're working doesn't mean other people in your organisation aren't too. You're aware that you're all on the same team, right? That work is not a competitive Quake deathmatch? That helping out a colleague isn't an automatic loss for you?
Just because *you're* working doesn't mean you should get the automatic right to hold up someone *else's* work by denyin
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which would be my point: Who's productivity does IM help?
While my not using IM may hinder your productivity, not using it helps mine. Anyone who needs me can send email and I'll get back to you when I can, or, if really important, call or stop by.
Seriously, unless you're choking on a pretzel or on fire, my time is more important than yours (generically, yours) - /. doesn't read itself you know. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
But of course, all productivity is negated through Slashdot. So whatever.
Oops (Score:5, Funny)
I appear to be in the wrong room.
_Not_ a waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell - just because it's obvious to you, that doesn't mean it's true!
Re:_Not_ a waste of money (Score:4, Insightful)
The perception of increased productivity is not proof just as the perception of decreased productivity is not proof.
Just because you were not interrupted does not mean productivity increased - you can be chatting all day with your significant other and not consider that an interruption. Hell, I am wasting time at work posting on slashdot and not being interrupted - BECAUSE I AM NOT WORKING. Work would interrupt me.
Parent
Definitely helps me! (Score:5, Insightful)
No Thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
I have also limited checking emails to 3 times a day. If there is an emergency, there is a phone and you can stop by my cube.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tes
Re:No Thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think the phone makes me far less effective than an IM ever could and cube-visits are even worse. IMs are the one method of bothering me who's obtrusiveness is under my control. If I choose to I can turn off the pop-up feature, or even do some work while I contemplate a reply. When the company-issued monstrosity on my desk shatters the [comparable] workplace calm with the default ringer at full volume there's no chance of me getting anything done for the next few minutes.That's going to tie u
Re:No Thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't stand interruptions when I'm trying to figure something out. My email client does not notify me when new email comes in, my IM is fairly unnoticeable in the corner unless I look at it, and I thankfully don't get many phone calls, and often ignore it anyway when it does ring. Now I have IRC and IM open all the time, but I can manage those kinds of interruptions much easier because I hit them when I'm at a point where a brief interruption won't bug me or disrupt my thinking. I guess the easiest analogy is reading a particularly interesting book; at a paragraph break or chapter break I can look up, talk to someone for a moment, or get a drink. However if someone came up to me and broke the "spell" I was under because I was in the middle of a paragraph, it's frustrating, and can ruin the experience.
It's quite common for me to forget to eat or put off washroom breaks for several hours when I'm in the middle of something. Someone poking their head in my office during one of those moments would probably cause me to lose all concentration for a good 15 to 30 minutes afterward, but if they were to send me an IM and I could get at it a minute (or even 15 seconds) later than they would have poked their head in, it wouldn't cause any issue at all.
There's no "might want to try that" to it -- some people just think and work differently than others. I'm not special or anything like that, but just because you have managed to organize your thoughts on paper and can handle interruptions doesn't mean that that method works particularly well for me. I generally recover from interruptions just fine, but people tend to interrupt me at points where it's not a good time to be interrupted, and that causes particular frustration, especially when it has happened for the third or fourth time that day.
Parent
And in other news study finds fat people healthy (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Sorta reminds me of (Score:2, Funny)
those old online polls that showed a percentage of people did not participate in online polls, hey look,
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=401 [slashdot.org] and 2521 people don't vote
IM'ing in line-of-sight (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Short answers drive me nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
It's great for productivity (Score:5, Interesting)
Where email is passive, and more formal, IM allows a boss to act like he or she can just sit there and chat at you all day telling you what to do. It's perfect for micro-managers. Where they used to be expected to write out an email with tasking, send it out and then expect a reply later, they can expect results right here, right now. The result is obvious: stress. Lots and lots of stress for the employees of a micro-manager with IM.
In my opinion, IM should be discouraged in the work place. If you want to send tasking, doing it by email or something formal like that. If you need to talk to someone in the same office, for the love of God, just go to their office and do it. If you're too busy to get up from your desk to do it, you're probably too busy to take time off to chat over IM. Yes, yes, there are exceptions, but generally speaking, that's true.
Re:It's great for productivity (Score:4, Informative)
My main boss, who spend her day in her office writing e-mails, is so non-confrontational that she will e-mail my immediate boss to ask for me to do something. My immediate boss, who spends all day in her office 15 feet from me writing e-mail all day, will then e-mail me. Before I get the e-mail (its webmail, so have to actively check it), both of them will have walked past me at least 10 times.
They will inevitably complain that I don't check my e-mail often enough.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I work for a 50,000 employee company that uses IBM's "Me too" chat system "Sametime". Most of the executives run
Not For Me (Score:5, Informative)
Over the course of a year my reports indicate the following:
IM almost always detracts from productivty becuase IM's either interrupted or shifted my focus to a non-working task, required status changes to prevent interruptions, and is often used for procrastination. This was the finding of a one-year quantification of my working habits using IM with clients on the same list as IM with friends. Even client conversations often got off task.
If you limit your IM to short work related need-only basis with no friends on your list at work, it is more efficient than calling and the IM logging functionality makes it easy to reference work. Using IM Logging for information (on trillians search interface) was faster than email lookup and desktop search). Small gain there.
Short Answer, for the majority of users IM will detract from productivity. If the IM environment is strictly controlled with no friends and co-works only IMing on a need-information-now basis, then IM can be a great productivity enhancment for short conversations (versus the phone).
Even ignoring the message requires interruption (Score:2)
However what happens most times is you get what seems to be a quick question, you answer then the person comes back a few mins later with a follow on, you answer, then they ask one more question. It would of been a whole lot better if the person had just called as the question and thier followup questions at one time.
Makes you wonder if this survey was asked by these people [slashdot.org]
IM status as your own receptionist (Score:5, Interesting)
I still occasionally get inappropriate messages, but it's pretty uncommon. Usually they're from someone I don't chat with often and they haven't figured out what all my statuses mean yet.
FYI the script is a cron job that runs every five minutes, and tries to figure out what my WAN ip address is (and sometimes narrows it down by LAN address too) and updates my status, assuming it's not set to something custom already.
Also, sometimes people have something they want to tell me but don't really need to discuss. When they see I'm busy they'll just IM me a one-liner with what was on their mind, ending with an indication that they are not expecting a reply. So at least for me, IM is extremely effective and efficient communication whether I'm at work or at home. It allows me to stay available to everyone without unwelcome distraction.
I wish I could do this with my coworkers' cell phones, omg so tired of a coworker getting continuous calls from relatives/friends while we're trying to get something done, HERE is the real problem!
Two schools of thought (Score:3, Interesting)
Since my jump to the Dark Side (Sales), I've found many of my coworkers are apprehensive to IM, as they're sales people who were forced into using the computer. Perhaps they cannot focus on multiple things at the same time, or they fear constant interruption. I see the most resistance to the A-Types or the obvious ones who are in the twilight of their careers and resist new technologies.
Sadly, my productivity is about to come to a screeching halt. My company recently announced the upcoming death of the Jabber servers and migration to Micro$oft Office Communicator. In my experience, anyone with this protocol has suffered dearly in regards to sharing links and having Micro$oft deem what is to be shared or not.
Reference to the original report (Score:3, Informative)
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/garrett.html [indiana.edu]
They compare IM users opinions with non-IM users on how often they get interrupted on a work task. 29% or so people use IM and it turns out they think they think they don't get interrupted as much compared to the non-IM'ers.
IM is ok, but unfortunately I also associate it with a lot of non-work related activity when I see some other people using it.
A more disruptive technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Most technologies eventually find their useful niche, like text messaging being great when you're in a place where it's either too loud to hear a phone call or when breaking the silence would be rude. But IM, despite having been around since the earliest days (I remember using it with a friend in the early to mid-80's), seems to have persisted because it's what people do when they want to procrastinate.
More of a survey (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, they just asked people if it made them more productive. People aren't really going to have much of an idea about their productivity rates.
A "study" would be if they actually quantified and examined the effects on productivity with and without instant messaging.
too true (Score:3, Insightful)
Too true, and any introductory Statistics class will tell you that a phone survey, on it's own, is pretty much useless because your entire sample comes from willing participants in the survey.