It would be interesting to see how younger employees that grew up with these gadgets respond versus the older generations that are just getting into the technology.

At the last firm I was with we tackled this issue up front by not giving Blackberries or any type of remote access to hourly employees. If a request was made for remote access it had to be approved by the section manager and it had to be shown that any overtime incurred could be billed out and they had to define a time in which the access would be removed. This did keep requests to a minimum.

This is definitely an interesting problem, and one that's now affecting me directly. Since I have an iPhone, I'm now able to respond to email in a more timely manner. This is great during the workday. However, I'm now starting to check work email in the evenings and on weekends and vacations, often writing in order to get things down before I forget. It's true, I do have a choice as to whether I decide to respond, but having the access - and my company knowing that I have access - makes me feel especially compelled to be totally available at all times. In fact, it seems almost irresponsible not to respond.

I wrote our policy this way - if folks are out of the office during business hours they are required to be available by cell or email or both, unless they have a pre-arranged or emergency personal engagement where they will be unable to respond. After hours, we've left it up to each person to decide whether or not they respond. Being writers who often work at odd hours late into the night, it's likely that they will; however, perhaps surprisingly, we have not had issues where folks have been slaving away after hours and feeling resentful - and this may be due to the fact that we reiterate our expectation that they be as productive as possible during the business day so that they do not feel pressured to continue working into the night, and that we expect them to preserve a healthy balance of work and downtime -- otherwise known as the oft-cliched "work-life balance".

I sometimes wonder if having this kind of accessibility encourages lesser productivity during the day (except perhaps in business situations where projects typically experience extreme swings in activity during the production cycle and in situations where the labor involved is highly dependent on an often-erratic creative process) - the thought process being that if one can respond later, then why bother acting on it right away?

Do others have thoughts on this?

This timely & very well written article by Al Sacco addresses some relevant issues for both public sector and private sector entities.
It was wisely pointed out that corporate use policies arguably should be written concerning the use of e-gear. The corporate counterclaim could be made that uses for e-solitaire, e-humour, e-chats, talks about Friday & Saturday nites, etc. are non-compensible.

It may sound "old school", but one should use personal discretion in how they use these devices. There is the factor of e-auditing, with regard to both voice and data forms of communication. As one who had a voicemail box in 1983, "back in the day" no one really hacked into one's messages. But today, public and private sector entities arguably have more reasons to audit different forms of media on a "for cause" basis, i.e., when white collar forms of crime are reasonably suspected.

(Prof.) P J Gammarano, M.A., J.D.
Author: "HUMAN SEXUALITY SCENARIOS 101+" ISBN: 1-4257-2853-7
"QUICK JUSTICE" ISBN:1-4257-4003-0
“ Teaching: Not For Dummies ISBN: 978-1-4363-0968-4
Publisher orders tel# 888-795-4274 or ORDERS@XLIBRIS.com
teaching affiliations:
K C C / CUNY and NYC DOE formerly MSU/ SUNJ & St John's University

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