Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The researchers found that groups of employees that communicate freely with one another, and communicate more frequently, are more productive than employees that are isolated from one another.
However, the researchers also found that the wrong type of communications (non-work-related, for instance) while doing tasks reduced productivity quite a bit.
Waber commented that the employees who spent the most time interacting between jobs got more work done that the workers who spent the least amount of time communicating with other employees.
In fact, their research found that the employees that interacted and communicated between jobs the most were 60% more productive than the employees that interacted and communicated the least between jobs.
However, the research discovered the employees that communicated during jobs were found to have their productivity drop drastically over the times they only communicated between jobs.
Waber stated that the most productive employees were the ones that had the “least variable behavior.” Waber commented that such behavior might be what psychologists call a “flow state,” or a person “in the zone.”
Waber presented the conclusions of the study on June 27, 2008, at the International Conference on Network Science (NetSci2008), which was held in Norwich, United Kingdom, between June 23 and 27, 2008.
Waber commented at the conference, “No one suspected that such interaction would help. The company was astounded — formally, these people were not supposed to be talking to each other.”
From his results, Waber thought that consistent work behavior is the best predictor of high productivity on the job, at least based on this study.
Waber is hesitant to say that this type of behavior is good for all employees. He concluded, "Tightly knit networks are really good for production teams that need to pool resources and share information, but they're terrible for marketing and distribution, because they don't have links to the outside."
This article is based on the Nature News article “Get a (social) life,” by John Whitfield.
The results of
the study were published online in
the journal Nature on June 30, 2008 (doi:10.1038/news.2008.925).
David Bass
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