Someone wrote to the Washington Post Jobs section asking “Who Do You Call When Your Boss Bans Cellphones?” Apparently the boss had not only outlawed personal cellphone usage at all times including getting alerts silently and during break times but also forbade using company landlines for personal use. That is a bit excessive in my estimation. I believe that an organization has a responsibility to make it’s employees available to their friends and families in emergencies.
I do believe in banning cell phone usage, not during break time though, and allowing use of company landlines for personal use in emergency situations. I can’t think of any reason that phone usage should be verboten in personal/family emergencies. Were cellphones used only in emergencies, I wouldn’t ban them either. We all know however that cellphone use in the workplace is rampant and flagrant. I bet most organizations could realize a 5 to 10 percent increase in productivity were cell phone usage to be banned.
Growing up as a child (oxymoron or impossibility???), I cannot remember a time that my mother called my dad at work or that my dad called home from work. I am sure it happened but those occurrences could in no way mirror the frequent instances of frivolous cell phone usage that I have seen in the work place. On top of cell phone usage, corporate email is also blatantly abused for personal use. At least, for the employee, that is not as visible to management and coworkers.
Fortunately, company landlines and corporate email can be monitored, abuse documented, and disciplinary action taken when warranted. I know from personal experience in the workplace that too much time is wasted on personal business using cellphones, landlines, and email. In an effort to trim telecom costs at a previous company, I found company cellphone users who were nighttime supervisors who racked up three times the amount of minutes per month the site VP racked up. Please reconcile for me why a night supervisor should need to spend an average of 100 minutes per shift on the telephone. Really, you don’t need to. I know from viewing the call records that those minutes were not used for business…
Disclaimer, I am in no way commenting on policies of any company I ever worked for. Also, I am single, have no exes, and no children, so my experiences having to keep in touch with people are extremely limited compared to many others. Nonetheless, we have done without the current modes of instantaneous and constant communications for thousands of years. What makes us sure that we have to have them now?