Cellphone in the Workplace

Over the past couple of decades, companies of all sizes across all industries have had to deal with a new disruption: personal cell phones. With the help of many volunteers across several LinkedIn groups, this article summarizes the results of a very informal and non-academic survey regarding how and why companies allow or prohibit cell phone use in the workplace.

The survey includes results from several LinkedIn manufacturing groups, which are not named here because of any concerns about permissions. The sample size is only about 200 individuals.

Survey #1

How does your company handle production staff cellphone policies?

• Some prohibit all cellphones in production areas.
• Some allow cellphones for music, etc., but prohibit texting and calls.
• Some place no restrictions on cellphones in production areas.
• Some allow cellphones to improve productivity (i.e. locating other staff, photos, documentation, calculations, etc.)

Survey #2

For those companies that do not allow cellphone use, what is the TOP reason cellphones are PROHIBITED at your facility?

• Safety
• Quality/Productivity
• Security (e.g. I.P. theft)
• Other

Results

Impact on Quality

Based on this very informal survey, for those companies that prohibit cellphone usage in the workplace, only 13% do so because of a concern that Quality or Productivity will be negatively impacted.

Overall Results

Conclusion

We conducted these surveys to determine a general idea of cellphone usage policies in manufacturing companies, specifically, how many companies prohibit all cellphone usage because of its negative impact on Quality and Productivity.

As the results suggest, again, in the very informal, unprofessional, and small survey, very few companies prohibit cellphone usage for the primary concern of impacts on Quality and Productivity (13%).