Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity 149
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.
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.
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.
_Not_ a waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell - just because it's obvious to you, that doesn't mean it's true!
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.
IM'ing in line-of-sight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Agreed, but only... (Score:1, Insightful)
Short answers drive me nuts (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't follow. (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 another project or leave your desk to physically find the person is a real pain.
And I'm not even going to go in to the usefulness IRC can be for tech support, where often you can get a straight line to the developers of whatever you're implementing!
Free Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and XBox 360 [free-toys.co.uk]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.
Re:IM'ing in line-of-sight (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Not For Me (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (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 hesitantly agree if that was the case), but as a broad-based comment it's inaccurate.
Re:u r rite! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's great for productivity (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 sametime on their crackberry as well as on their PC, so they can IM in meetings, and request up to the minute stats and analysis when in an important decision making mode.
Some things are on-demand, and when I am doing risk management analysis for the Ceo while he is in a closed door meeting with the FTC, it is significantly retarded to expect him to say "Wait! I need to walk 1/8 of a mile down the hall to confer with my data analysts to ensure that I have my story straight"
There are jackasses with every technology, just because Assholes cut you off in traffic in their car talking on their cellphone listening to the radio, doesn't mean we should automatically become luddites about radios, cellphones, and automobiles.
Instant message is half way between a phone call and an email, and it is nice to have a middle ground that I can use without taking off my headphones, or averting my eyes from the familiar glow of my LCD.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (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:3, Insightful)
Re:Not For Me (Score:2, Insightful)
Spouses need to talk to each other about things sometimes. My wife has IM at her office and we chat from time to time during the day. It's no different than if she were to call me a couple of times a day, and is much less obtrusive to my work - she can ask me something that isn't urgent via an asynchronous mode of communication.
At my job before this, it was frowned upon to use IM for anything, though not actually blocked in a systematic way. Just due to the need for personal phone calls where an IM would be ideal, I was less productive. I find dropping everything to answer my phone and kick my brain into verbal mode to start talking to be much more disruptive to my thought processes than typing.
That said, a lot of geeks are simply prima donnas about being interrupted. If you're not thinking about a matter of life or death there is no train of thought that is too important to be interrupted; the interruption method is a non-factor.
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.
Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America (Score:2, Insightful)
So IM isn't the cause of slacking off and if you ban it, people will find some other way to slack off, even if you continue to ban everything you can think of.
The smarter (and harder) way to prevent people from slacking off and using IM is to provide positive reinforcement of good work ethic, rather than trying to ban the vehicle of poor work ethic.
Re:Doesn't follow. (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 denying them a simple yes/no answer, which might cost you two minutes of interrupted attention but the lack of which might cost *them* hours to days of work, or cause a server to be broken "because they can't afford to hassle the developers/network team" and so they try to do something themselves without the information they need.
The question should be "what is the right balance of isolation vs interruption", because when development teams get isolated from their support and operations colleagues (you know, the ones with all the "annoying questions") they end up losing touch with the reality of what's making their products break. And then all that isolated, focused work ends up becoming pointless anyway if it's not solving the problems which are relevant to the organisation right now.
Tools like IM which can help you answer quick questions without the full-on distraction of a phone call or a desk visit can be a huge win here for everyone.