Forget wrath, greed, sloth, etc. These are the seven sins updated for an always-on culture that likes to keep its social media close and its email closer.

“Back in the dial-up era, when going online had a cost implication, most people checked email maybe once a day and often responded as soon as they read them,” said Dr. Emma Russell, a psychologist from Kingston Business School in England. “Now, with broadband and 3G, unlimited numbers of messages can be streamed through smartphones at any time of the day or night. However many of us haven’t adapted our behavior.”

Responding to emails on your off hours is one of the sins.

“This puts pressure on staff to be permanently on call and makes those they are dealing with feel the need to respond,” Russell said. “Some workers became so obsessed by email that they even reported experiencing so-called phantom alerts where they think their phone has vibrated or bleeped with an incoming email when in fact it has not. Others said they felt they needed to physically hold their smartphone when they were not at their desk so that they were in constant email contact.”

Russell analyzed email usage across different companies, marking positives and negatives, and identified these seven email sins.

1. Ping pong – constant emails back and forth  creating long chains
2. Emailing out of hours
3. Emailing while in the company of other people
4. Ignoring emails completely
5. Requesting read receipts
6. Responding immediately to an email alert
7. Automated replies.

How many of these sins are you committing?

(photo credit: alexander_witt via photopin cc)

Our latest issue of Facility Manager is now online and available for you to flip through, read, and share.

Features in this issue include our cover story on farm-to-table in venues, an intriguing story about a shelter-in-place that happened during a Taylor Swift concert, and a discussion of sound design featuring St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York.

In addition to all the great sector columns written by our members, you can read profiles of Jan Addison, CFE, and Adina Erwin.

If you’re a member or subscriber, the printed edition should arrive in your mailboxes soon. In the meantime, though, visit us online and share any thoughts or ideas you have about the issue or future issues in the comments section below.

There was a lot of news this past week you may have missed. Here are some headlines that caught our eyes.

Angry Birds Coming to NHL Stadiums Across the Country
—GameStop
“Not only will the HockeyBird mascot greet fans at stadiums in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Vancouver, but Rovio will launch new interactive Angry Birds games on jumbo screens. The two games are called Slingshot and Slapshot, both of which use ‘state-of-the-art voice activated technology.'”

Cities Create Music, Cultural Festivals to Make Money
—Governing
“Municipal officials and entrepreneurs see the power of cultural events as a way to spur short-term tourism while shaping an image of the host city as a cool, dynamic location where companies and citizens in modern, creative industries can thrive.”

How the Australian Open Turns Match Data Into Dollars
—Business Spectator
“In a windowless bunker located meters away from the Rod Laver Tennis court, a team of IBM engineers are working feverishly to turn mundane match statistics into a money-spinner.”

How to Avoid “Square Peg in a Round Hole” Campus Event Scheduling
—Ungerboeck
“Are you a campus scheduling rebel? Are you the event or venue manager at your college or university who is using a different system from the other departments to coordinate your events? You might be a square-peg-in-a-round-hole event scheduler.”

3 Time Management Tips That Will Improve Your Health And Productivity
—Business Insider
“…how can we manage our time to live healthier and happier, do the things that we know are important, and still handle the responsibilities that are urgent?”

(Image: NHL/Rovio Entertainment Ltd.)

“The room’s too cold.” “Where’s our lunch?” “The security is harassing us!” —These comments could happen on any social media channel during any event at any venue, and it’s important that employees are monitoring and responding to them. While businesses are actively attuned to channels such as Facebook and Twitter during regular business hours, the level of monitoring drops off during an event, exactly when it should be increased. That’s just one of the findings in our 2013 Technology Report, available for purchase* at www.iavm.org/venueds. 

*IAVM member venues that participated in the 2013 Technology Survey receive a copy of the report for free.

Photo credit: JGoge / Flickr

Raise your hand if you keep your smartphone next to you when you’re in bed. Now raise your other hand if you still use it for work-related matters after 9 p.m. Touchdown. You may be more tired and less engaged at work.

Michigan State University (MSU) researchers have found that workers who monitor their smartphones for business purposes in the evening sap their energy for work in the office the next day.

“Smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep,” said Russell Johnson, a MSU assistant professor of management. “Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep.”

There were two studies. In the first one, 82 upper-level managers completed daily surveys for two weeks. In the second study, 161 employees from a variety of fields were surveyed daily. Both studies showed that sleep patterns suffered when smartphones were used for work at night. The second study also compared smartphone use to other electronic devices and found that smartphone use was worse than watching TV or using a laptop or tablet. Finally, smartphones emit a blue light, which has been shown to curtail the sleep chemical melatonin.

“So it can be a double-edged sword,” Johnson said. “The nighttime use of smartphones appears to have both psychological and physiological effects on people’s ability to sleep and on sleep’s essential recovery functions.”

The easiest solution is to turn off your phone at night, but for most people that would be the equivalent to cutting off your writing hand.

“There may be times in which putting off work until the next day would have disastrous consequences, and using your smartphone is well worth the negative effects on less important tasks the next day,” he said. “But on many other nights, more sleep may be your best bet.”

(photo credit: BuzzFarmers via photopin cc)