Submitted by Adrian Gaskell MCMI on Wed, 08/02/2012 - 12:01
Article from CMI
There have been numerous studies in the past few years reporting the growing trend of managers not really switching off when they're away from work, be it using electronic devices to check in at home or failing to properly switch off whilst on holiday. The consequences of such activities are clear both in terms of stress and lost productivity.
Similarly, in many discussions I have with people about social media, the issue of time and how it is spent is raised. Such thinking suggests that input is what is important, that we pay people to be at the office for a fixed period of time each day rather than to produce results for us. It's input dominated rather than output dominated.
New research by the University of Toronto suggests that these two things are intrinsically linked. They found that when people put a price on their time they are much more likely to be stressed and unhappy when they're not using their time to earn money. That in turn makes it much harder for them to enjoy their leisure time.
"Treating time as money can actually undermine your well-being,” says Sanford DeVoe, one of two researchers at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who carried out the study, which is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The researchers found that when people are primed to think of time as money, they are much less likely to enjoy free time. The flip side though is that they were more likely to enjoy time where they were earning money.
The experiments’ results demonstrate that thinking about time in terms of money “changes the way you actually experience time,” says DeVoe. “Two people may experience the same thing, over the same amount of time, yet react to it very differently.”
With growth over the last several decades in jobs paid by the hour, it’s important for people to be “mindful” of the impact this can have on their leisure enjoyment, he says, and allow themselves “to really smell the roses.”
So if you care about your employees and want them to be as happy at home as they are at work, it would appear focusing on outputs rather than inputs would go some way to achieving that.
Article from CMI