Study Finds Instant Messaging Helps Productivity

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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Re:No Thanks

[Tesen]

Consider yourself fortunate that you do not have users stopping by for what is an emergency for them, but not everyone else. IM is useful when they IM me and say, "HELP! HELP! NEED REPORT! PLEASE CODE NEW ONE!! URGENT!! URGENT!!" if it isn't I get to tell them I am working on something else that is higher priority and to see my team lead if they want my priorities changed. This saves myself a face to face with them, which saves interruption to my neighbors.

Tes

Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America

[fictionpuss]

It's entirely possible to reach zero productivity by just gossiping on the telephone too. Yes there is the potential for some productivity loss to non-work chatter - but "hello" and "goodbye" are two common social extravagances which are taken for granted as a cost of productively using the telephone. I wonder if future generations will view the equivalency easier than those who grew up without IM? I was highly skeptical of IM in a work environment, but I recently contributed to an OSS project which is conducted almost 100% over IM and I was converted. So I'd recommend that skeptics actually try IM with other serious-minded developers.

Re:No Thanks

[cavtroop]

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.

I tried this, but found that it simply increased my pop-in interruptions significantly. Someone would IM (which would get ignored, as i was set 'away'), or email, and after 10 minutes or so of no response, they plop on over and poke their head into my office. I've tried explaining to them what I am trying to get done (more work), but the culture here is one of interruptions. Drives me up the wall.

IM status as your own receptionist

[v1]

I move around a lot every day, and my availability varies depending on where I am, and who is trying to IM me. IM's from a coworker or business contact are different than say, IM's from mom or a friend. I modded my IM client to change my status depending on where I'm at, so everyone I interact with can figure out whether or not it's a good time to ask me a question or just chew the fat.

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

[TheSpatulaOfLove]

I've found that IM helps me tremendously, however I know some of my counterparts find it to be inhibitive to their workflows. Coming from a technical background, I'm used to having many windows open at once and alt-tabbing constantly between them to get multiple things done. My favorite part is being able to communicate during conference calls, where a side conversation is neither possible nor appropriate. If it's a customer facing conference call, action items requested from the customer can many times be completed during the call or shortly thereafter, as the ideas are fresh in everyone's mind, and I can tie in people that may not be able to be on the call.

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.

Re:No Thanks

[wattrlz]

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 up a hand to hold the phone and a good portion of the part of my brain that does stuff. If I get a cubicle visit it's even worse because it's downright rude to even try to do something other than what you're discussing while there's another human being in your cube.

I do not concur.

[DaedalusHKX]

I think, if you pay heed to what is going on, that the most productive people, are usually also the stupidest.

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".

Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America

[Sodade]

I am a fulltime teleworker for a 50k+ employee megacorp. In one day, I could have meetings with Europe at 6am, and Asia at 8pm. Every employee has Sametime IM (not a fan) on their desktop. All of the work I do involves complex cross functional interaction. 75% of the people I work with use it effectively. The other 25% are salespeople or director level. Those people are still in the phonecall/voicemail world, which sucks up a much larger proportion of my work focused time.

Over the last three years of using IM, I'd say that my email volume has reduced dramatically and my email quality has increased - all because I can answer quick questions on the fly with IM.

I haven't even met most of my co-workers, but they all know that I am responsive and on the ball. I attribute some of that perception to the fact that I am available >12hours a day to answer their questions, thus making them more productive.

Some situations are better handled with a quick phone call, but IM actually enables real phone conversations because you can see if someone is available and ping them with a "time for a quick call?" I NEVER leave people voicemail anymore and I rarely receive it. Voicemail is a stupid waste of time IMO. Maybe that perception is colored by the fact that the only people who actually leave me VMs are handshake monkeys (salespeople and directors).

Re:No Thanks

[tzanger]

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.

Re:A more disruptive technology

[Treffster]

has not been invented. Not only does IM constantly interrupt your train of thought and derail productive activity, but it also sucks down minutes and minutes when a 15 second phone conversation would do.

I find that a totally ridiculous suggestion. I'm a reasonably senior software developer with a team of 12 people working in 4 dev offices next to each other. Every case of IM is very much a "hey, whats the answer to this". I answer it quickly if I can (or ignore it till I finish my current line of progress), then if its easily answerable I answer it with a short reply.

If its not, I get up and walk to their desk in my own time and spend the 15-20 minutes required to get them back on track.

The alternative would be every developer visiting me at my desk any time they needed an answer/input from me (which is frequently). The increase in disruption would be SIGNIFICANT. If its going to require 15-20 minutes to sort out, I much prefer being able to tell them immediately, "busy right now, I'll see you soon" than having to stop what I am doing and addressing them standing next to me.

We also all have desk phones, but personally I find a ring INCREDIBLY distracting compared to a small little flashing taskbar icon. One you can ignore, the other you can not.

Re:IM status as your own receptionist

[Treffster]

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!

This is the most true thing I've ever read on slashdot. Its worse for me... All my coworkers in my room don't speak English at home, so instead of being able to ignore it as background noise, I have this incredibly distracting drone of Indian or Indonesian - more distracting because your subconscious keeps trying to make out the words even though its impossible.

Re:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America

[ifrag]

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:Not So Obvious to Many in Corporate America

[theshowmecanuck]

I did the same thing. Worked with people all over the U.S. and India via IM. My opinion is that we lost a lot of shared knowledge etc by not having the people in the same place. Knowledge wasn't passed and shared as much as is done when people are in the same place. That alone killed over all productivity for the group and meant each person had to learn individual points each time the individual encountered them... as opposed to the whole group literally hearing about it all at once. Yes, you can broadcast messages in IM but issues are generally handled one at a time by people using IM because it is more difficult to interact with people except in IM and then you don't know if others are encountering the same issues and the solutions don't get shared as easily. When IM is used to converse with people almost exclusively say, in the same building, or in a smaller organization, this might not be as much the case. And when a particularly thorny problem occurred, we HAD to talk on the telephone. It allowed us to solve problems that were literally taking hours on IM to be solved in very short order. Communications is personal... the more you make remove the direct human contact, even losing voice contact, you make communication more difficult. That makes productivity more difficult. Of course geeks have garnered a reputation of being less adept at personal communication. Reputations are gained for a reason. Finally, it makes no sense to ask the people using the tool if they are more productive, they have no objectivity. You need to find a measure of productivity that you can observe externally and compare apples to apples.... objectively.