A recent Kaspesky Lab research shows that employees are 26-percent more productive without their smartphones.
The Universities of Würzburg and Nottingham Trent, commissioned by Kaspersky Lab conduction a psychological experiment which revealed a correlation between productivity levels and the distance between participants and their smartphone. When their smartphone was taken away, participant performance improved by 26 percent.
The experiment tested the behavior of 95 persons between 19 and 56 years of age in laboratories at the universities of Würzburg and Nottingham-Trent. Care was taken to balance experimental conditions and gender across laboratory sites.
Researchers asked participants to perform a concentration test under four different circumstances: with their smartphone in their pocket, at their desk, locked in a drawer, and removed from the room completely.
The test results were lowest when the smartphone was on the desk, but with every additional layer of distance between participants and their smartphones, test performance increased. Overall, test results were 26% higher when phones were removed from the room.
Contrary to expectations, the absence of the smartphone didn’t make participants nervous. Anxiety levels were consistent across all experiments. However, in general, women were more anxious than their male counterparts, leading researchers to conclude that anxiety levels at work are not affected by smartphones (or the absence of smartphones), but can be impacted by gender.
The results of the experiment correlate with the findings of an earlier survey – named “Digital Amnesia at Work.” In this survey, Kaspersky Lab demonstrated that digital devices can have a negative impact on concentration levels. It showed, for example, that typing notes into digital devices during meetings lowers the level of understanding of what is actually happening in the meeting.
While banning digital devices from the workplace is not really an option, these findings – combined with those of “Digital Amnesia at Work” – give businesses an insight on how to improve their productivity.
“Instead of expecting permanent access to their smartphones, employee productivity might be boosted if they have dedicated ‘smartphone-free’ time. One way of doing this is to enforce ‘meeting rules’ – such as no phones, and no computers – in the normal work environment,” said Sylvia Ng, general manager at Kaspersky Lab Southeast Asia.
“Businesses should also be aware that in today’s connected business landscape, lower concentration levels can be a security issue. Advanced targeted attacks, for example, can only be discovered if employees are alert and on the look-out for unexpected and unusual email content. It is therefore vital that businesses develop security processes, including training sessions, to increase employee alertness, whether employees are using their smartphones at work, or not,” Ng added.
Kaspersky Lab has been researching the social effects of digitalization, and how digitalization makes people more vulnerable to cybercrime, for the last two years. An overview of the findings is available at amnesia.kaspersky.com.