BlackBerry Blackouts
February 6th, 2008 by Cali & Jody
Oh, Canada! What are you doing? We turn to you for cheap prescription drugs and commonsense and then you do this.
Silencing people’s “CrackBerries” will not create work-life balance. Even a well-meaning rule, like a BlackBerry blackout from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. and on weekends and holidays, is still a rule. And it’s the rules of the workplace (7:59 am is “early” while 8:01 is “late”) that are killing us.
This policy also makes a fatal assumption about work: that work happens at a specific place (the office) or when doing certain activities (using your WhateverBerry). Instead, we’d like people to start thinking about work in terms of what it really is: a state of mind.
If you’re sitting on a beach and you’re working through a problem you’re having on a project, then you’re working. On the other hand if you’re in your cube zoning out and wondering about who’s your favorite American Gladiator, then you’re not working.
In a Results-Only Work Environment, we don’t make any assumptions about what work looks like. As long as people get results, they can work in a cube or they can work on the beach. They get to define what balance means to them. They achieve that balance because they have the power to do so.
What’s so shortsighted about this particular ban is that nighttime Blackberry use might be *beneficial* to work/life balance under a very easily imagined scenario:
My wife likes to watch t.v. way more than I do, but I’ll often watch with her because I like spending time with her doing the things she likes to do.
My kids go to bed ~8:30 p.m.
I have tons of e-mail to work with each day, and if I don’t keep up I get antsy.
So, think of how *nice* it would be for me to catch up with my e-mail via Blackberry *while* I sit with my wife while she watches “Lost” or “CSI” or whatever. The kids are in bed, maybe we have a glass of red wine to enjoy, she’s watching a show she likes, I’m spending time with her . . . AND I’m staying caught up with my e-mail so that I’m not antsy about it.
One size does NOT fit all.
I am going to leap to the defense of our friends to the north and point out that some employers abuse the always-in-touch feature of the BlackBerry by emailing you at 11 p.m. and expecting an answer before midnight.
The ban would take care of that sort of nonsense.
Of course, I realize the problem here is not the BlackBerry. Years ago I had a boss who would go into the office on Sunday and if I wasn’t there, would leave a note (with time and date) on my desk saying, “I was here. Where were you?”
Imagine this guy with a BlackBerry.
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