Why we struggle to leave work at work

When IBM did some market research about the way people in various countries used laptops, one of the questions was along the lines of: "Would you buy a laptop if it meant you could do work at home?"

Germans thought that was a good idea.

Italians shrugged, looked incredulous and said: "Why would I want to do that?"

Despite a climate which at various times of the year is almost Mediterranean, New Zealanders find it hard to leave work at work.

A new survey by telecommunications equipment and software giant Avaya, titled Working To Communicate Better In Business, found New Zealanders more wedded to work than workers in Australia, the United States, Britain, Germany, Brazil or Russia.

Some 58 per cent of New Zealand managers said that if better communications saved them an hour a day, they would use the time to catch up on their workload.

Only 36 per cent of Australians would stick around the office. Perhaps because of a higher influx of Italians into their society, the rest would take off for the beach or the bosoms of their families.

The survey says one of the reasons New Zealanders feels swamped at work is poor convergence between office and mobile phones.

That may be a result of the difference in cost between fixed and mobile calls, which is higher than in most other countries, and the high cost of services like call forwarding to mobiles.

A third of respondents said they picked up important messages late at least once a week, and 30 per cent said not being able to contact key people when they wanted to had cost them revenue.

A staggering 94 per cent of the New Zealand managers said they regularly received work-related calls out of work hours, compared with an international average of 48 per cent and a low of 35 per cent in Germany.

Even in the United States the out-of-hours call rate was only 58 per cent, although with that country's long working days and limited vacation time for most workers, there may be fewer opportunities to catch people at home.

While other countries said the most important benefit from better converged mobile telephony was improved customer service, New Zealanders saw it as a way to allow for better communication with staff first, then customers.

"This result implies there are significant communication barriers for workers, particularly between employers and employees," says Avaya solutions development manager Robbie Kruger.

"If New Zealand is to meet increasing productivity demands, the first thing businesses need to ensure is that staff have the tools to communicate effectively with each other and customers."

The survey found 76 per cent of emails and calls the New Zealand sample received were from staff and colleagues, compared with a worldwide average of 41 per cent.

Customer communications made up only 16 per cent of the total, compared with 31 per cent worldwide.

However, 95 per cent of managers said they would trust their employees to telecommunicate if effective telecommunication systems were in place, with 60 per cent of bosses believing this would improve productivity.

In contrast, only 58 per cent of Australian bosses believed their employees wouldn't rort the system if allowed to work from home.

Kruger says the survey shows the pressure New Zealanders are under to keep up with growing workloads at a time of skill shortages.

He says employers need to be conscious of the work-life balance among their workforce if they want to keep good people.