Effect of Smartphone Bans in the Workplace

Smartphones are the ever-present companion now because of the constant availability of online content and connectivity through messenger services and social networks distracts people at work. Employers viewing the use of smartphones during work time with suspicion voluntarily refrain their staff from using smartphones in the workplace through an internal agreement but the effect of these measures are unknown. .

A strict ban on smartphone use is difficult to enforce and hard to control considering it as private property especially in times when people are working from home, so companies do not go beyond soft non-monitored bans.

A study published in the journal Experimental Economics shows that the benefits of smartphone ban in the workplace depend on the type of work and no improvement in the execution of more complex tasks.

This large-scale field experiment on students assigned with the task of phoning lists of telephone numbers and conducting interviews with volunteers as two groups with and without the ban on smartphone resulted in students banned from using their private smartphones making more calls per hour than the students without a ban and no clarity in effect on the number of successfully completed interviews.

"Social norms play an important role in the context of bans. Soft bans could lead to staff themselves seeing it as less appropriate to use their smartphones during work time - due to perceived social pressure," explains Chadi, junior professor for personnel economics and human resource management at the University of Konstanz and one of the authors of the current study.

The evaluation of follow-up interviews with the students involved in the field experiment revealed they respected the ban voluntarily indicates understanding as a further factor in the success of smartphone ban in the workplace.

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Source-Medindia