(Image credit: Getty Images)
People hate being ignored in favour of a phone, or ‘phubbed’. New research shows phone-obsessed bosses may cause long-term damage to employee morale.
A
A mobile phone is a great way to keep in touch with someone far away. It’s also a great way to alienate someone who’s sitting right next to you. And in the workplace, a boss distracted by their phone could be causing serious long-term damage to employee morale and, eventually, to the company’s bottom line.
Baylor University marketing professors Meredith David and Jim Roberts are scholars of consumer behaviour. They’ve examined the impact of smartphone use in romantic relationships and friendships. To describe the act of ignoring someone in favour of a phone, they use the term “phubbing” – an apt if somewhat awkward portmanteau of “snub” and “phone”.
In their most recent collaboration, the researchers looked at what happens to trust in the workplace when bosses can’t put down their phones. In short: it disappears faster than an Instagram story.
“Phubbing is going to negatively impact the trust that one has in that person who is distracted.
An individual starts to think: ‘Am I not valuable enough? Do they not care what I have to say right now?’” David says. “It also makes them think: ‘What is this person doing that’s so much more important than looking at me right now?’”
In the study, the researchers administered a survey to 156 participants about their boss’s phone use, their trust in their boss, their overall satisfaction at work and their efforts on the job. Bosses ranked high on phubbing behaviours were associated with less trust and lower performance.
It’s a small and far from comprehensive study. Since the survey didn’t ask about other factors that might make a boss untrustworthy, it’s possible that unhappy employees overplayed their supervisor’s negative relationship with the phone. But the conclusion echoes an experience that many of us have had at work, or elsewhere: feeling second-best to whatever’s on that tiny screen, an anxiety-producing experience made worse by the fact that that it’s often nearly impossible to tell what, exactly, you are being ignored for.
Research has found that the mere presence of a phone in the room can reduce subjects’ ability to focus. (Credit: Getty Images)
In one 2018 study, researchers found that simply imagining the experience of being phubbed by a conversation partner left participants unsettled and unhappy. In romantic relationships, people fill in that blank with assumptions about a partner’s interest or fidelity. In the workplace, an employee rebuffed by his or her manager will start to question their own value and may, eventually, disengage entirely.
“The questioning that’s going on is: ‘Does my boss not think I’m worthy of attention? He doesn’t think I can handle a job. He doesn’t trust what I have to say,’” David says. “The downstream effect is an employee not feeling valued or satisfied in their job, which will end up lowering their performance.”
Fractured attention
Because so many of us turn from an in-person conversation to our phones as soon as they ping, the presence of a cell phone in our boss’s hand during a conversation can feel like a signal that we’re not a priority.
“As humans, we are relational beings,” says Brandon McDaniel, a research scientist at the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “When individuals break eye contact with us during an interaction and instead pay attention to their phone, especially when we had expected them to pay attention to us, it indicates to us that (at least in this moment) our interaction partner values whatever is on their device more than us and the time we are spending together. Thus, our satisfaction with this relationship will deteriorate, regardless of whether it is a romantic partner or boss.”
Inveterate phubbers who defend their actions (“keep talking, I’m listening!”) may very well believe that they can effectively divide their attention between a phone and a conversation partner. But abundant research has shown that for the vast majority of people, multitasking is a myth. What’s actually going on is a series of rapid cognitive shifts in attention between the various tasks that shatter the ability to deeply focus on either. So strong is the association between cell phones and fractured attention that research has found that the mere presence of a phone in the room reduces subjects’ ability to focus.
“A person may try to multitask while talking on the phone, but performance on both tasks (the conversation as well as the other task) would be worse than if the person just performed each task separately,” says Veronica Galvan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of San Diego. Bosses who believe themselves to be superior multitaskers may do even worse, she says: people who identify as good at multitasking actually perform worse on simultaneous tasks than those who don’t.
‘Would another time be better?’
So if it hinders attention and hurts others’ feelings, why would otherwise well-meaning people reach for their phone in a conversation? It may be because many of us use our phones less like tools and more like drugs. While the biochemical rush that comes with checking a phone is minor compared to that of addictive substances like cocaine, the urge to reach for that small pleasure hit can become compulsive.
If the compulsion to use a smartphone is like an addiction, David suggests treating it like that other socially-sanctioned vice: smoking. Rather than indulging the habit in settings where it might offend colleagues, limit smartphone checks to discreet breaks of time throughout the day. She also advocates the adoption of company cell phone policies, so that managers can enforce rules fairly (and be held to them themselves). An increasing number of companies have caught on. The Society for Human Resource Management offers sample policy templates on its site that address limits on personal cell phone use in the workplace.
Alison Green, author of the popular blog Ask a Manager, often fields questions from managers and employees frustrated by inconsiderate phone use in the workplace. Green offers a sample script that employees can use to tactfully broach the subject when a supervisor is the offender.
“You could say something like: ‘When you’re on your phone for so much of our meeting time, it makes it tough to tell if you’re hearing what we’re saying,” Green says. “’I know that obviously emergencies will come up that you have to deal with, but it seems like it’s more than the norm than not for you to be on the phone for most of our meetings. Is there a different time we could schedule these for where you’d be less likely to be interrupted?’”
The office isn’t the last setting that David and Roberts want to explore in their research. They are interested in looking at how phone use affects the relationship between parents and children, and changes the experience of church (ministers who ask congregations to consult Bible apps during their sermons have found that it’s difficult to get their attention back from the phone).
As for the workplace, researchers suggest adopting a no-phone policy for in-person meetings so that all are fully present. And in situations where an urgent call or text is expected, preserve the trust in your work relationship by being transparent and respectful. Explain in advance to the person you are meeting that you are anticipating an urgent message, excuse yourself when the call comes in and be brief.
“Communicate with your employees how it makes you feel when they use their devices around you and what you expect them to do (and what you are going to do) with devices in order to show that people and relationships are the priority, instead of the device,” McDaniel says.
;
Credit: Source link
