40% of us send business messages from bed

A recent study by Nortel has found that people are being overloaded by constant communications at work, whether that’s email, text message, landline or mobile. As a result, we are spending increasing amounts of our personal time sending business messages.

The findings show that over 60 percent of us send business messages while on holiday, 40 percent of us send business messages from bed, over 30 percent send business messages from restaurants and there’s even a small percentage that send them from church. As well as that, the findings show that 67 percent of us are using our mobile phone and 64 percent are using our laptop for both business and personal use.

All of this means the lines between our business and personal lives are blurring and the technology designed to help us is actually starting to make the traditional working day slightly redundant. The findings show that only 35 percent of respondents feel that having all these communication tools helps them, whilst 21 percent feel it actually makes their lives more difficult – this is a clear call to action for businesses to have a strong communications strategy in place with a clear training programme to help staff to deal with communication overload.

The findings also show that more people in Europe use text messaging and instant messaging (IM) for business than anywhere else in the world, at almost double the rate of the US – this raises serious issues with compliance. Employees generally understand that there is a legal liability attached to any email messages they send, but with more of us using IM for business, people don’t realise the legal ramifications this could have. Again, businesses really need to start looking at ways to educate staff better and prepare themselves for a more complex communications operation.

Where is the strangest location that you have sent a business message from? Drop us a line and let us know…