Mobiles and Work

A research study in Great Britain suggests that office workers spend an average of two extra hours a day dealing with office matters via smartphones and tablets.  The survey found that 90% of office workers have a mobile device capable of handling emails, and that a third of them report using their mobile devices more than 20 times a daily - and not only during office hours.
  Ninety percent of office workers say they take work-related calls and/or respond to work-related emails outside of their normal working hours.  Two thirds say they regularly check for work emails before going to bed and as soon as they work up.  One third admitted responding to work calls or emails in the middle of the night.

Ghadi Hobeika, marketing director of Pixmania (sponsor of the study), said: ‘The ability to access literally millions of apps, keep in contact via social networks and take photos and video as well as text and call has made smartphones invaluable for many people.
‘However, there are drawbacks. Many companies expect their employees to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and smartphones mean that people literally cannot get away from work.
‘The more constantly in contact we become, the more is expected of us in a work capacity.’

Travel website TripAdvisor recently conducted a similar study, found that many people take work with them on vacation.  More than half of their sample indicated that they checked work emails daily while on vacation, and more than a third take calls from the office, or call into the office, during vacations.

  Critics suggest that mobile devices have contributed to "work addiction" fed by fears of losing one's job in these tough economic times.  Certainly, technological advances - particularly mobile telecommunications - are making it easier to stay connected to the world away from the workplace and home.  But by assigning a single motivation principal to these reported patterns of mobile usage, these critics seem to be suggesting that no other motivation might exist; that no one wants to work, never dealt with work issues while away from the office before smartphones, or finds personal value in staying connected.  There's a lot of reasons people want to stay connected, and lots of reasons why they occasionally want not to.  These studies report behaviors, but do not go into examining the motivations for those behaviors - and from a research perspective, we shouldn't try to claim knowing more than what the studies examine - use of specific devices during specific times.

Source -  Smartphones and tablets add two hours to the working day,  The Telegraph