Do you receive texts? Seems like an innocuous question, right? According to Portio Research, 7.8 trillion texts were sent in 2011 and 8.6 trillion in 2012. By 2016 they predict earthlings will send almost 10 trillion texts. That’s even more than the total number of complaints Yahoo! employees sent to their HR office this past February. What’s the rule of thumb for answering a text? Is it immediate? Do you feel the urge to answer a text right away because you’ve set your phone settings to vibrate whereas other notifications — like email, Facebook,,etc. — are simply in your to do list queue? Is there any psychology research behind our beliefs in texts versus other forms of digital communication? Have you stopped reading because you’re
mobile Archive
In a landmark 2007 paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology called “The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown About Telecommuting: Meta-Analysis of Psychological Mediators and Individual Consequences”, authors Ravi Gajendran and David Harrison of the Department of Management and Organization at Pennsylvania State University dispelled the notion that working from home was bad for business or bad for employee morale. It’s a paper I’m certain the internet company Yahoo! failed to read when they recently announced all 12,000+ employees had to begin working from Yahoo! offices 100 percent of the time effective June 2013. What did Gajendran and Harrison prove? Through the review and analysis of 46 individual studies that featured 12,883 employees, these researchers determined working from home demonstrated seven positive outcomes:
My jaw dropped when I read it. Thanks to an internal memo leaked to Kara Swisher by a Yahoo employee, we have insight into a recent decision by their C-Suite. Taking a page from “we liked it better when we physically saw you hammering keystrokes on your laptop” the struggling company (bada Bing?) has mandated any Yahoo employee currently working from home (full-time or on occasion) must relocate their fingers and keystrokes back to the office by June. That’s right … if a Yahoo employee was able to work from home, it’s no longer in the employee contract. I call it ‘management yahooliganism‘. The memo itself was penned by Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s Head of Human Resources. I’ve no idea whether Jackie (and CEO Marissa Mayer)
When I left academia in 2002 I also left the trappings of an office. When I switched organizations in late 2008, I also gave up a singular desk space. I’m like PacMan careening through a corporate game board collecting points at the desks, tables and rooms I occupy. I am a floater. I’m on a quest for the corporate floater high score. There are no ghosts in this game. Wherever the wind takes me — be it the road, various offices, home or coffee shops — I am working. I float. I’m like those bubbles we blew as a kid except I don’t pop when I crash into a wall. Too many childhood childish metaphors? With no office and armed with my laptop, tablet, mobile
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