Smartphones were expected to make you smart. With the world at your fingertips, your productivity at the workplace should have increased in leaps and bounds. Perhaps it has. From an employers’ perspective, however, it is the prime cause of productivity loss.

“Personal use of technology is one of the leading culprits behind unproductive activity at work,” says a survey by CareerBuilder. “One in four workers (24 per cent) admitted that, during a typical workday, they would spend at least one hour on personal calls, emails or texts. Twenty-one per cent estimate that they spend one hour or more searching the Internet for non-work-related information, photos, etc. Behaviour of co-workers, meetings and other factors are creating obstacles to maximising performance.” (see box)

You can’t complain too much about cellphones. What they have also done is increase the executive’s work time. Today, the go-setter is on call from before breakfast and it would not be unusual to find him answering emails in the middle of the night. What you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts.

But the survey gives other employer examples of time wasting that stretch the credulity a bit. Sample some of them:

• Employee was blowing bubbles in sub-zero weather to see if the bubbles would freeze and break

• Employee was caring for her pet bird that she smuggled into work

• Employee was shaving her legs in the women’s restroom

• Employees were having a wrestling match

• Employee was sleeping, but claimed he was praying

• Employee was taking selfies in the bathroom

• Employee was changing clothes in a cubicle

Why do people get up to such absurd stunts? “You have to start from the premise that every employee feels that his company is encroaching upon his personal time,” says Mumbai-based HR consultant D. Singh. “So nobody is too worried about bringing a bit of home into office space.”

The survey was conducted in the UK. But it is very relevant in certain domains in India too. In IT or IT-enabled services, for instance, where mobility is high, people feel that having fun is a part of work. Employers haven’t helped by proving concierge services for staff including things like taking your dog for a walk. That was in the good times for employees, when talent was hard to find. But a new era of job scarcity can’t drive all memories away.

Be that as it may, it is only when an organisation matures, stumbles and you need an outside CEO that you realise that it is not so much productivity that counts as the veneer of productivity. With PCs on every study table and office files available at home or on the cloud (security be damned), you can be a prankster in the office and Mr Productive at home.

But, at the end of the day, you are a bad example. Your bosses might realise you are carrying your weight; your colleagues don’t. Companies have to take action. More importantly, they have to be seen to take action. According to the CareerBuilder survey, nearly three in four employers (73 per cent) have implemented some measures to mitigate productivity killers at work. Tactics include:

• Blocking certain Internet sites at work – 36 per cent

• Prohibiting personal calls or personal use of cell phones – 25 per cent

• Monitoring emails and Internet usage – 22 per cent

• Scheduling lunch and break times – 19 per cent

• Allowing people to telecommute – 14 per cent

• Implementing an open space layout instead of cubicles – 13 per cent

• Limiting meetings – 12 per cent

• Restricting use of speaker phones – 11 per cent

“This is traditional thinking,” counters Singh. “In today’s world – to deal with today’s employees – you have to think out of the box. It is not very easy to measure, but a person’s contribution must be judged by how much he impacts the bottomline. The yardsticks are going through revolutionary changes. But the worst you can do is live in the past. Productivity is no longer dependent on the number of widgets you process every hour.”

WRONG NUMBER

Productivity stoppers in the workplace (the employers’ view – percentage citing)

Cellphone/texting – 50

Gossip – 42

The Internet – 39

Social media – 38

Snack breaks or smoke breaks – 27

Noisy co-workers – 24

Meetings – 23

Email – 23

Co-workers dropping by – 23

Co-workers putting calls on speaker phone – 10

Source: CareerBuilder survey of hiring managers and HR professionals in the US