Catch any train leaving at a designated peak time and you’ll be guaranteed to see people tapping away on their laptops, presumably doing office work. A study undertaken by the University of the West of England concluded that since access to wi-fi on trains has increased and use of mobile phones has become a norm, the working day has been extended.
The study examined 5000 rail passengers on commuter routes to London. It found that 54% of commuters used the trains wi-fi services to send work emails, whilst many others used their own mobile phone connections for work emails.
Whilst commuters saw it as “dead time in a way, it allows me to do is finish stuff and not work in the evenings” the University says it does raise questions of the work-life balance and if this journey should be recognised as part of working hours. The study found that people were working extra hours on top of time spent in the office, indicating that technology is in fact giving less flexibility over working.
Dr Jain, from the university’s Centre for Transport and Society noted that counting the journey as work could “ease commuter pressure on peak hours” travel, allowing more staggered travel times.
My own view is that it would be it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to put this into practice as how do you monitor which of this time is work time? Most employees will no doubt flick between work and personal use on their commute. Whilst an interesting study, I don’t consider this is something that employers need to be worried will come into practice for some years yet, if ever.
The increased use of personal devices though for work matters, does though raise issues of data protection and should your business allow such use and not have appropriate safeguards in place, do please speak to me or indeed your IT company to discuss what protections could be put in place.