IM in the Office

This is extraordinary to me! That it has been proven that persons whom work in a cubical style workplace are claiming that using instant messenger only creates a small distraction compared to more common types such as phone calls and face to face conversations. The idea is that the work can be focused and only pertain to information that is essential to the work that needs to be done. It is the idea that you can wait to respond to a message more easily than a phone call where one would feel obligated to answer immediately.

The idea I find hard to grasp is that employees would only talk to those that they are working with. It’s not like the employer has controls to see who someone is messaging. That and even if they attempted someone would probably claim infringement into their freedom of speech. So how do we expect employees to honestly do more work with such a simple distraction? I know for myself I had to remove Instant Messenger from my computer due to me not getting work done. Work that could wait for a five minute chat, that would soon become two hours and leave me scrambling to finish before it was due at midnight.

Hence the case for them to remove instant messenger from the office altogether. The research done was also merely interviews where they sat down with employees and asked them how they felt their work was affected by Instant Messenger. Instead of actually comparing offices productivity of businesses that allow IM and those that do not to see which gets more work done. This is an only a suggestion for potential methods to confirm or deny thee findings. But in my opinion the findings are not the best and can stand to have farther investigation .