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By Tony Hallett, 2 December 2004 14:20

COMMENT Advances in mobile and wireless technology can please employers by leading to improved productivity but, argues Tony Hallett, are too many staff unwisely working longer hours, the victims of 'connectivity creep'?

Anyone who makes use of mobile and wireless technology to access email knows it can be liberating. Think about moving around the home with a Wi-Fi-connected laptop, clearing email on a Blackberry during what would have been a 'dead' hour at an airport terminal or even synching a PDA to go through your inbox on the journey home from work on the Tube.

But there seems to be a consensus in the industry that more time spent working in any of those ways - or several others involving on-the-go access to corporate data - is a good thing, full stop, end of debate.

We see this in the way services and products are sold. A current campaign for a popular smart phone from Sony Ericsson beams: 'Be in the office without being in the office.' A lot of bosses out there will love the idea of that. But could it just be the sort of message that strikes fear into the heart of the average employee?

At the launch of some research this week, commissioned by Microsoft and carried out by the London School of Economics, a representative from trade unions body the TUC was notably muted on the subject of the longer hours many of us put in as a result of being contactable at almost any time.

In a leader article this publication makes the point that flexible working made possible by wireless, mobile and remote working technologies is clearly often a good thing, cutting down on commuting and allowing all kinds of workers to arrange their time in a way that fits their lives. But studies show that home workers, for example, end up putting in more hours than their office-based counterparts - albeit often willingly so - but with little attention paid to health and safety standards.

And just as past technological advances have promised productivity gains for individuals, their employers, even the whole country, so too mobile and wireless technologies, especially in relation to functions such as receiving and dealing with email, are touted as a godsend.

Research carried out earlier this year for Blackberry-maker RIM by Ipsos Reid came to the conclusion that employers can recuperate 188 working hours a year - equal to a month of work assuming a 48-hour working week - for each member of staff they provide with a Blackberry wireless email device. To an executive on £100,000 a year, that translates to £9,800 in annual recovered downtime - an attractive proposition to any company.

But the benefits don't stop there, the research found. At the same time it claimed employees can salvage 108 hours a year, through daily time savings of around 27 minutes. RIM decided to present that as "equivalent to 13 days extra holiday", though clearly most efficiencies allow more work to be done by any individual.

And there's the rub of it. Very few organisations will ever deploy new technologies, then work out - assuming things go well - the gains that are made and pass these on to staff in the form of fewer hours worked. They will expect the staff to do other things with that time.

As a RIM spokeswoman said in relation to the Blackberry research, what improved efficiency does allow is user organisations to at least make that choice.

Similar research, carried out this summer by the Economist Intelligence Unit in cooperation with Cisco, found that "mobility-friendly companies have more productive employees". This refers to the use of mobile technology, rather than saying workers should all get out on the road more, and a key finding was that those who do have to travel a lot are desperate for good technology. That's not quite the same thing as, say, extending a mainly deskbound worker's day by having them answering emails on the way to and from the office or at the weekend.

Many would argue the latter scenario isn't likely to be seen much. Speaking recently about the use of mobile email software on smart phones, PalmOne head of alliances Martin Day said: "It's all about reclaiming downtime… in small chunks, some as little as 10 seconds."

That sounds like something mainly for executives or those in certain professions. Journalists at silicon.com frequently meet head honchos of tech companies literally expected to be available 18 hours a day, working as they do with global networks of offices, partners and customers, and even during holidays, checking emails every day. That is exceptional and something for which most of them are handsomely rewarded.

But maybe all employers and employees should be conscious of 'connectivity creep', whether for reasons of legality (working long hours) or efficiency (a tired, mistake-riddled email or document being worse than one that takes a while to be sent but which is correct). And yes, as soon as the employee who occasionally has to work outside the office gets a Blackberry or any device with software for wireless email, that can happen.

In September this year we reported on a PR executive who was happy with his near-constant availability. True, he no longer had to wait around in the office for emails. But the downside? "Now I can go home and deal with [them] while I have dinner with my family."

Our guess is that most people, across all sorts of industries, expect and need downtime.