Eoin Whelan

So we expected those guys to be constantly glued to their phones, but no, they felt that in their personal lives they were over-connected and they liked having the opportunity of not being connected when they were in the workplace.

It was actually the older employees who had maybe kids or had parents they had to look after or other responsibilities outside of the workplace, they were the ones who were putting pressure on the company to reverse the phone ban.

Yeah, and I guess the context, again, is important.

So in our study, it was originally for health and safety and it just carried on for about 20 years.

In the employees that we studied, they were office workers, essentially, so having phones and plenty of distractions wasn't essentially...

a health and safety issue when you're in the office.

In other organisations that could be quite different.

I'm looking out the window here at a building site and there's a big crane and lots of heavy machinery and they have a sign up to tell the workers not to bring their phones onto the work site and I totally understand that.

If it's a health and safety issue and you could be distracted by a phone, well then maybe restricting access to the mobile phone is justifiable.

But if it's office workers and it's very low use and they just want to, you know, stay in touch with what's happening in the outside world with their kids or with the school or like some of your Voxpop speakers are saying, I think that's OK.

Yeah, it works both ways.

Certainly in my own organization, the university here, we have multi-factor authentication.

If I want to log on to a system, I need to use the phone to verify who I am.

So in that way, having a personal phone can help with security.

In other industries, well, one example, I was talking to a student who worked for one of the fashion houses in Paris, and their phone is taken off everybody as soon as they go into the workplace.

And that's for their own intellectual property, that if somebody took a picture of a new dress or a shirt or whatever...

that could get leaked out and do a lot of damage to the company.

So again, the type of company, the type of work they do, the type of security issues they face, every company in every situation is unique.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's all about setting expectations or management setting expectations for employees.