Do you check your e-mail or voice mail in the evenings, on weekends, in the middle of the night, or on vacation? Do you feel compelled to check for electronic messages regularly, because, if you don't, you'll be even more overwhelmed by the volume? Do calls on your cell-phone or pager keep cutting into your personal time?
If you have answered yes to even one of these questions, you are bound by the electronic leash, an invisible trap created by today's anyplace, anytime technologies. It's the result of a technological metamorphosis that has changed work done anyplace and anytime to work that must be done everyplace, all the time. No wonder we feel that we can't get away from our work.
It wasn't that way at first. Inspired by the promise of virtual communication like we grew up seeing on Star Trek, we spent billions on cell-phones, pagers, voice mail and e-mail. We thought it was fun to have pay telephones on airplanes as we trekked from one business meeting to another in a faraway city. We were delighted when hotels put fax machines in guest rooms. We chuckled to see people running down an airport concourse while talking on a phone—anywhere in the world.
Every day, we see the promise of this new world of communication become common reality. No matter where in the world you are, today's technologies keep you in touch. You've seen the sales pitch. You can be walking down a beach, standing on the top of a mountain, or driving down a road. You can be anywhere, and be in touch!
Somewhere, however, communication in the virtual workplace got warped. Can you recall any advertisement for e-mail, voice mail, fax, cell-phone or pager that said, “Kiss off your weekends, your time with your family, your time for yourself, and any time where you feel that you are away from your work”?
Somehow, despite all the real benefits these technologies have brought, the electronic leash has quietly fastened itself around the necks and lives of many. The tens of thousands of managers I meet through speeches and workshops every year are uniformly saying the same thing: We can't get away from work!
Electronic Leash Environment
The electronic leash has popped up in just about every environment of the virtual workplace. Whether your project has people working in different locations around the world or in a single location that has people working around the clock, whether some on your team telecommute from home or commute to a traditional office, the sense of the electronic leash is everywhere. Here are some symptoms:
Out of Control Volume. Take Barbara, who vowed that she would not check her e-mail or voice mail during her 10-day vacation. She was dedicated to enjoying 10 wonderful days on the beach in Maui and not letting her daily deluge of electronic communication rule her life. When she returned to work after her sun and fun, over 1,000 e-mail messages had accumulated in her electronic in-basket. Even her voice mail message, which announced that she would not be in the office, didn't deflect an additional 96 voice messages, some which were urgent, requiring a response “now”—a week before she returned!
E-mail, for many, has mutated into a “CYA” tool much more than a communication tool. People play it like a game of tennis. When the message arrives, the ball is in your court. So you spend most of your day lobbing the ball to someone else's court. You are safest when no balls are in your court. And you have a written record to prove it!
Blurred Workday Cues. Take Mark, who cleared all of his e-mail messages before going to bed at 11 p.m. When he logged onto his computer the following morning, four messages were waiting. Two were from his boss. Mark said, “This happens all the time. Doesn't anyone on this team ever sleep?” (Everyone on his team works in a single time zone.)
We take our cues from our bosses, and Mark's boss is sending the unspoken message: “Mark, it's 3 a.m. Why aren't you working? I am.” Of course most bosses would never say that directly. But our actions speak louder than our words. Bosses that wear pagers to bed, send and receive e-mail in the evenings, and are instantly reachable by cell-phone on weekends, are giving unspoken work cues. Those unspoken cues can be loud; for example, a boss who sends out a message at 4:45 Friday afternoon for work to be done by Monday morning. Not only are each of us doing the work formerly done by two or three people, but many of us are also working their hours!
False Sense of Urgency. Do you remember when fax machines first came to your office. The phone rang and then a document miraculously began to appear. People would gather around and watch the amazing new technology do its thing. Somehow that transmission sent at the speed of light carried a sense of urgency that said, “Drop everything. Take care of me. I am important.”
But it didn't take long for the fax and other new technologies that came after it to become phenomenal ways to send trivia. Now managers have a tough time telling the really urgent messages from the false alarms. From messages like “Does anyone want to buy a puppy?” to others that give absolutely no clue what the sender wants, we plod through e-mail chain mail, through rambling gobbledygook, through junk.
Today when the fax line rings, few pay attention. After so much junk, messages sent through this medium no longer carry a high sense of urgency, even when so marked on the cover sheet. Now, urgency is created by the person who weeds through the communication jungle to find the nuggets of information that matter. Managers are in a constant struggle not to overlook something important in the stack of “all that stuff” we have to plod through every day. And all of that takes time—lots of it.
24/7/365
On a recent trip, I couldn't help but laugh inside when I saw an emblem on a baseball hat that said 24/7/365. I thought, “In the virtual workplace, that's our new office hours!” It's no laughing matter, though: It's tough to stay on top of the volume. It's frustrating to waste time plodding through rambling paragraphs trying to find something that may be critical. It takes time just to feel like we are pretty well on top of things. It has become impossible to find a moment when we can say, “I'm finished for the day.”
Could it be that we are all too stupid or timid to say, “Enough!” Why, like drones, have we let our workweek expand into our private time and private lives? Why do we tolerate the huge volumes of ineffective communication that continue to monopolize our time? Why aren't we acting on the problem?
The answer is easy. It's Parkinson's Law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you schedule one hour to write a report, the report will be completed in one hour. If you schedule four hours to write the same report, the report will be completed in four hours.
When our workday used to be 8 to 5, with occasional extra time, we got the job done mostly in those hours. With a host of around-the-clock tools to link us anytime and anyplace, the time scheduled for work just expanded. And, just as Parkinson's Law states, our work expands to fill the time. That is, unless we take steps to do something about it.
How to Break the Electronic Leash
Don't Expect Your Boss or Company to Say “Work Less.” I have yet to hear of any company where upper management has said, “Don't work so hard.” In most companies, they're saying just the opposite. Getting ahead today in many businesses does require a 60–80 hour week. If the promotion, reward, or experience draws you willingly to work those long hours, then you have made your personal choice. Knowing Parkinson's Law, however, you may be spending more time than you need to at work to get the same fulfillment and the same result. Less time on a task doesn't necessarily mean less productivity.
Schedule Personal Time, and Then Don't Violate It. Burned-out people are not productive people. As human beings, we all need time to be mentally and physically away from work, no matter how much we enjoy that work. Schedule 8 to 5 Monday to Friday for work. Then schedule the personal time you need, such as to see your child perform in a school play or to participate in an activity that energizes you. Once scheduled, do not let work violate that time! You may need only a couple of evenings a week away from work or you may need all of them. Only you can decide the balance you need. Once you block that personal time on your calendar, don't let anyone take it away! Then, when you are in “business hours,” be more focused on doing those activities that make you more productive.
Get More Disciplined About Electronic Communication. One reason why e-mail and voice mail are out of control is that people have not put discipline around it. With the click of a few keys, people send anything to everybody, about any topic, usually without any thought about its impact on the recipient, on productivity, on the whole problem of e-mail and voice mail overload.
Ineffective messages cost everyone time, productivity, and dollars. In fact, one company found that a “Who wants tickets to the ball game?” message that was distributed to 200 people in the company cost $800! That amount only included direct costs such as salary for people's time to process the message and disk space. It did not include other costs like how long it takes someone to get back on task after the interruption—which other research has shown to be higher. Nor did it include response-time costs, or back-and-forth messages when the original message is incomplete or unclear.
Set NETiquette for message length, topics, distribution, urgency, responsiveness, and attachments. Get control of the problem by setting clear expectations. Set NETiquette for how to address offenders, and what kind of action to take. Make each person on the team, not just the project leader, responsible for living up to the NETiquette you have established as a team.
Uncontrolled, the electronic leash is a nuisance (noose-ance). Structured for effectiveness, however, the Star Trek tools that all of us use can enable people who communicate across time and space to really be “connected.” The problem isn't the technology; rather it's the way people use it. Let's talk about it. Let's be honest about the problem. And let's commit ourselves to building a better structure to let us really be in touch in this bold new world of the virtual workplace. As project manager, you can make a difference!
Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D., is the author of Virtual Leadership, a best-selling book about the people side of leading across distance. Her firm, Bridge the Distance, Inc. (Denver) is available at http://www.distance.com