Bad Blackberry manners can be costly

MOBILE email has become so distracting for some workers it could be costing their employers money.

Users are paying more attention to their Blackberries, iPhones and other gadgets rather than meetings and conversations – and businesses are complaining it upsets workplaces, wastes time and costs money.

"It happens all the time, and it's definitely getting worse," said Jane Wesman, a public relations executive and author of Dive Right In - The Sharks Won't Bite.

"It's become an addiction," she said.

According to a recent poll by employment website Yahoo! HotJobs, one third of more than 5000 respondents said they often check their emails during meetings. Such habits have their price, said the website's senior managing editor Tom Musbach.

"Things like BlackBerries fragment our attention span, and that can lead to lost productivity and wasted dollars because people aren't focused on their work, absolutely," he said.

Multi-failing

But the constant pursuit of an email fix may be costly. Research shows such multi-tasking can take more time and result in more errors than does focusing on a single task at a time.

"We know that if you have a person attending to different things at the same time, they're not going to retain as much information as they would if they attended to that one thing," said Nathan Bowling, an expert in workplace psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

"If you're attending to multiple things at the same time, you often times don't learn anything," he said.

People who text message when they should be doing something else are engaging in what Mr Bowling called counter-productive work behaviour, which also includes harassment, showing up late or playing endlessly on the internet.

"Technology allows us to do counter-productive things that we weren't able to do 10, 20 or even five years ago," he said.

Business etiquette coach Barbara Pachter said there is a "learning curve" to new technology such as BlackBerries.

"We're still at that point where we're being rude," she said, adding that user behaviour is likely to improve in the next few years.