Why be tied to your desk if you have portability?
It often seems they proliferate faster than one can keep track of them. Cellphones, camera phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants, pocket PCs, handheld PCs, portable media centres — it’s difficult not to feel overwhelmed.
As mobile technology continues to thrive in the marketplace — and the workplace — the need is growing for human resources to anticipate issues arising in terms of how they change the way Canadians work and play. These issues include work-life balance concerns, privacy questions and perhaps the most basic question of all: why even bother with them?
Slow uptake
According to Statistics Canada, about 15.5 million Canadians now have a cellphone or a wireless personal digital assistant (PDA). That’s one in two Canadians, which sounds like a lot, but we are lagging behind the United States and Europe. Canadians may be more circumspect about the utility of these mobile devices, but market penetration is growing. According to StatsCan, 438,000 Canadians purchased a cellphone or PDA between March and June of last year, representing a 12-per-cent increase from 2004. That growth is impressive, but it may increase even faster as wired phones fail to compete on costs and flexibility.
In the U.S., a larger but comparable market, the overall handheld market was estimated to grow from 14 million users in 2003 to 20 million, according to JupiterResearch, a New York-based research firm. The figure represents a market penetration of just seven per cent. Growth of PDAs in particular was expected to remain flat at five per cent through 2005, and then increase by just one per cent a year over the next two years until peaking in 2008. The projected small growth might indicate the corporate push to provide these tools to staff has peaked — at least until more applications become commonplace on these portable tools.
Why go portable?
Portable devices have been the tools of certain work groups, especially sales, for years. But if you work at your desk and never leave it, you may wonder why you need them at all. The market penetration numbers above would indicate that it’s not a minority asking this question. The market is still evolving rather rapidly as the proliferation of new hardware and software would indicate.
Like any other tool, we all need to decide if it is useful to us, or others in the workplace. The question may not be, “why have portability if I work at my desk?” but “why be tied to my desk if I have portability?” Will HR see the value in portable connectivity, and will their support systems evolve? We can all help make that choice.
Lifestyle impact
One of the biggest impacts of all these tools is a significant spillover of the boundaries between work and home. The lines have started to seriously blur. Work issues may take up more of people’s personal lives, and home issues may start to creep more into workplaces. Many professionals report a reluctance to turn off cellphones when they get home, and checking e-mail in the evening and on weekends is becoming routine.
The reverse is also increasing. A recent study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, followed more than 1,300 people over a period of two years and showed that women have more negative spillover from home to work. Perhaps HR needs to get more heavily involved in these issues from a health, safety, and quality of life perspective. Just as we mandate some degree of time off in the form of vacation, maybe more formal barriers between time at work and time at home need to be created.
Safeguarding information
Privacy and security of personal information are also key issues thrown up by the growing use of such devices. Many organizations are concerned with protecting information from improper use or disclosure, and are considering rules to control how data can be accessed, stored and transmitted.
Wireless technology itself can create privacy problems. Unlike conventional wired infrastructures where transmission takes place over a guarded and closed medium, wireless networks are an unpredictable no man’s land with no guarantee of successful communication. Wireless networks operate in an unlicensed spectrum alongside Bluetooth devices, microwave ovens and cordless phones, opening the door to potential interference that ranges from annoying to terminal.
The HR challenge
The design of work, including the ergonomics of using various tools, has always been HR’s concern. And like most tools, mobile devices can be used in positive or negative ways.
What HR professionals and employers can do to help employees deal with these issues should be the focus of considerable discussion within HR ranks.
Ian Turnbull is managing partner of Laird & Greer Management Consultants, specializing in HR, payroll, and time system selection and management. He is co-author of: HRMS: A Practical Approach (Carswell, 1999) and editor of Privacy in the Workplace – The Employment Perspective (CCH, 2004). He can be reached at [email protected] or (416) 618-0052.
Hot products
Examining the market
There is a strong trend toward multi-functional devices, with one in three consumers willing to carry only one unit. In addition to telephony, mobile devices are assuming more and more functions including those of a camera (both still and video), text and instant message systems, FM radio, alarm clock and MP3 players.
Convergence — the trend of coming together — adds to the cellphone those functions that have typically been thought of as belonging to a PDA. These would include real-time e-mail (made famous by the BlackBerry), calendar, contact list or address book, software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Global Positioning System.
Estimates are that worldwide feature-rich smartphone sales will account for 45 per cent of the PDA market by 2008 — with Western Europe topping 63 per cent. An In-Stat/MDR’s study found more than half of surveyed consumers are interested in checking e-mail from their wireless handheld devices.
The top three integrated devices today are the Palm Treo (650), the 6515 Pocket PC from HP and the BlackBerry (7250). All three offer Bluetooth technology for connectivity. The price point is between $500 and $700 depending on the plan purchased from a cellular phone company.
Complete HRIS applications for HR professionals are starting to be offered on PDAs (Spectrum being one vendor in particular), but wireless access hasn’t really taken off for these yet. Another concern is the small screen size of PDAs and cellphones.
It seriously limits some functions, especially those that require some size to display properly, such as spreadsheets, an HR staple. It has been two years since engineers at the University of Toronto announced that they had constructed flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens.
Unlike today’s flat panel displays made on heavy, inflexible glass that can break during transportation and installation, FOLEDs are made on a variety of lightweight, flexible materials, ranging from transparent plastic films to reflective metal foils, which can bend or roll into any shape. A marketable device could be available soon.
As mobile technology continues to thrive in the marketplace — and the workplace — the need is growing for human resources to anticipate issues arising in terms of how they change the way Canadians work and play. These issues include work-life balance concerns, privacy questions and perhaps the most basic question of all: why even bother with them?
Slow uptake
According to Statistics Canada, about 15.5 million Canadians now have a cellphone or a wireless personal digital assistant (PDA). That’s one in two Canadians, which sounds like a lot, but we are lagging behind the United States and Europe. Canadians may be more circumspect about the utility of these mobile devices, but market penetration is growing. According to StatsCan, 438,000 Canadians purchased a cellphone or PDA between March and June of last year, representing a 12-per-cent increase from 2004. That growth is impressive, but it may increase even faster as wired phones fail to compete on costs and flexibility.
In the U.S., a larger but comparable market, the overall handheld market was estimated to grow from 14 million users in 2003 to 20 million, according to JupiterResearch, a New York-based research firm. The figure represents a market penetration of just seven per cent. Growth of PDAs in particular was expected to remain flat at five per cent through 2005, and then increase by just one per cent a year over the next two years until peaking in 2008. The projected small growth might indicate the corporate push to provide these tools to staff has peaked — at least until more applications become commonplace on these portable tools.
Why go portable?
Portable devices have been the tools of certain work groups, especially sales, for years. But if you work at your desk and never leave it, you may wonder why you need them at all. The market penetration numbers above would indicate that it’s not a minority asking this question. The market is still evolving rather rapidly as the proliferation of new hardware and software would indicate.
Like any other tool, we all need to decide if it is useful to us, or others in the workplace. The question may not be, “why have portability if I work at my desk?” but “why be tied to my desk if I have portability?” Will HR see the value in portable connectivity, and will their support systems evolve? We can all help make that choice.
Lifestyle impact
One of the biggest impacts of all these tools is a significant spillover of the boundaries between work and home. The lines have started to seriously blur. Work issues may take up more of people’s personal lives, and home issues may start to creep more into workplaces. Many professionals report a reluctance to turn off cellphones when they get home, and checking e-mail in the evening and on weekends is becoming routine.
The reverse is also increasing. A recent study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, followed more than 1,300 people over a period of two years and showed that women have more negative spillover from home to work. Perhaps HR needs to get more heavily involved in these issues from a health, safety, and quality of life perspective. Just as we mandate some degree of time off in the form of vacation, maybe more formal barriers between time at work and time at home need to be created.
Safeguarding information
Privacy and security of personal information are also key issues thrown up by the growing use of such devices. Many organizations are concerned with protecting information from improper use or disclosure, and are considering rules to control how data can be accessed, stored and transmitted.
Wireless technology itself can create privacy problems. Unlike conventional wired infrastructures where transmission takes place over a guarded and closed medium, wireless networks are an unpredictable no man’s land with no guarantee of successful communication. Wireless networks operate in an unlicensed spectrum alongside Bluetooth devices, microwave ovens and cordless phones, opening the door to potential interference that ranges from annoying to terminal.
The HR challenge
The design of work, including the ergonomics of using various tools, has always been HR’s concern. And like most tools, mobile devices can be used in positive or negative ways.
What HR professionals and employers can do to help employees deal with these issues should be the focus of considerable discussion within HR ranks.
Ian Turnbull is managing partner of Laird & Greer Management Consultants, specializing in HR, payroll, and time system selection and management. He is co-author of: HRMS: A Practical Approach (Carswell, 1999) and editor of Privacy in the Workplace – The Employment Perspective (CCH, 2004). He can be reached at [email protected] or (416) 618-0052.
Hot products
Examining the market
There is a strong trend toward multi-functional devices, with one in three consumers willing to carry only one unit. In addition to telephony, mobile devices are assuming more and more functions including those of a camera (both still and video), text and instant message systems, FM radio, alarm clock and MP3 players.
Convergence — the trend of coming together — adds to the cellphone those functions that have typically been thought of as belonging to a PDA. These would include real-time e-mail (made famous by the BlackBerry), calendar, contact list or address book, software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Global Positioning System.
Estimates are that worldwide feature-rich smartphone sales will account for 45 per cent of the PDA market by 2008 — with Western Europe topping 63 per cent. An In-Stat/MDR’s study found more than half of surveyed consumers are interested in checking e-mail from their wireless handheld devices.
The top three integrated devices today are the Palm Treo (650), the 6515 Pocket PC from HP and the BlackBerry (7250). All three offer Bluetooth technology for connectivity. The price point is between $500 and $700 depending on the plan purchased from a cellular phone company.
Complete HRIS applications for HR professionals are starting to be offered on PDAs (Spectrum being one vendor in particular), but wireless access hasn’t really taken off for these yet. Another concern is the small screen size of PDAs and cellphones.
It seriously limits some functions, especially those that require some size to display properly, such as spreadsheets, an HR staple. It has been two years since engineers at the University of Toronto announced that they had constructed flexible organic light emitting devices (FOLEDs), technology that could lay the groundwork for future generations of bendable television, computer and cellphone screens.
Unlike today’s flat panel displays made on heavy, inflexible glass that can break during transportation and installation, FOLEDs are made on a variety of lightweight, flexible materials, ranging from transparent plastic films to reflective metal foils, which can bend or roll into any shape. A marketable device could be available soon.
