DealBook: As Twitter Opens Up, Employees Do, Too

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Some Companies Seek to Wean Employees From Their Smartphones

Atos, an international information technology company, plans to phase out all e-mails among employees by the end of 2013 and rely instead on other forms of communication. And starting in the new year, employees at Daimler, the German automaker, can have incoming e-mail automatically deleted during vacations so they do not return to a flooded in-box. An automatic message tells the sender which person is temporarily dealing with the employee’s e-mail.

No one is expected to be on call at all hours of the day and night, and “switching off” after work is important, “even if you are on a business trip,” said Sabrina Schrimpf, a Daimler spokeswoman, referring to the company’s recently released report, “Balanced! — Reconciling Employees’ Work and Private Lives.”

Disconnecting can be more challenging for business travelers who frequently work across time zones.

And there is a ripple effect, said Leslie A. Perlow, a professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and the author of “Sleeping With Your Smartphone.” “These guys fly in the middle of the night and send e-mails back to colleagues” who wait up, ready to respond.

A study conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that while mobile phones were valued as a way to stay productive, there were downsides to being available at all times. The nationwide survey of 2,254 adults found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed and that 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. Still, the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” has gone up, to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

Sam Chapman, chief executive of Empower Public Relations in Chicago, said he used to feel phantom vibrations and frequently read and sent e-mail on his BlackBerry in the middle of the night. He slept poorly, did not feel refreshed in the morning and considered himself addicted. “I wanted to make sure that what happened to me didn’t happen to my employees,” he said.

So Mr. Chapman adopted what he called a BlackBerry blackout policy. He and his staff of about 20 turn off their BlackBerrys from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on weekdays and completely on weekends for all work-related use, with rare exceptions. “When I’m well rested, I show up to work ready to go,” he said.

He maintains that regimen while traveling, and said the policy had increased company productivity.

Professor Perlow agreed that companies could improve their bottom line by encouraging employees to disconnect at times. “Being constantly on actually undermines productivity,” she said.

But it is not always easy. In early 2012, when Michelle Barry, Mark Jacobsen and a third partner created Centric Brand Anthropology, a Seattle-based company that advises clients on brand strategy, design and culture management, they gave serious thought to the issue.

“A huge priority for us was to have a good balance between work-life,” said Mr. Jacobsen, Centric’s vice president and creative director. “Yet we have found that very difficult to do while working with large multinational clients,” which often require international travel and constant availability.

Being a start-up compounded those challenges. “Just because you can e-mail at 2 a.m., doesn’t mean it’s a good thing,” he said.

Centric encourages employees to prepare a week before a trip, designating a colleague as backup, informing clients about their travel plans, and trying to avoid deadlines immediately after they return. Employees are also encouraged to take spouses or partners on longer assignments and to build in downtime, said Ms. Barry, the company’s president and chief executive. When traveling, she said, “I make a commitment to myself not to stay up all night answering e-mails.”

Experts say there is no firm data for how many companies have policies restricting the use of electronic devices outside the office. “The companies I know actively encourage workers to stay connected after hours and on weekends,” said Dennis J. Garritan, a managing partner of the private equity firm Palmer Hill Capital and an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School.

Entrepreneurs Starting Up With Fewer Employees

Corner Office | Ben Lerer: Ben Lerer of Thrillist, on Encouraging Employees

Q. Tell me about the culture of your company.

A. One thing that we preach at work all day long is “don’t hope.” What that means is don’t wait for somebody to do something for you. Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do.

The only time when you can have real regret is when you didn’t do everything you could do. I want to never hope, even though I hope just like everybody else. It’s just important to know that you’re giving as close as you can to 100 percent, dedicated effort, and you’re being thoughtful about it.

Q. Where did that expression come from?

A. It probably came up about five years ago when someone was asking me, what’s the best piece of advice you can give an entrepreneur? The first place that I used it was really early on in the business, when there’s no way to point fingers, when you’re just four or five people, and you have to will everything yourself.

Q. When you started the company, were you thinking about the culture you wanted to create?

A. Not in any way aside from being affected by the way I felt very mistreated by a manager I had in a previous job. Part of the problem was that I was young and immature and I sort of walked in on Day 1 out of college and had this attitude of, “Give me the keys.” But I ultimately didn’t like going to work because of the way I was treated, my work suffered, and I didn’t have confidence in what I was doing. And ultimately that led me to decide to leave.

Q. How was this person a bad manager?

A. There were sort of the big and obvious things. I remember being regularly publicly humiliated. I’d send out an Excel spreadsheet that didn’t have first and last names broken out into separate fields, and he sent a “reply all” to the entire company telling me how stupid I am and how bad I am at Excel. There were so many situations where I remember being just made to feel inferior and stupid, no matter how hard I worked. I was a kid out of college and I was not qualified to do some of the work I was being asked to do, but I did my best. And when my best wasn’t good enough, I was told I was very stupid, essentially.

And I just remember saying: “I never want to make anybody feel this way. This is horrible.” And it made me think; I don’t want to be in a situation like this again. I want to create a better situation for myself. So we really try to do that. And I think we succeed more than we fail on a person-by-person basis.

Q. What insights have you had about culture as the company has grown?

A. Within the last year, there was sort of another turning point — there’s always that moment when you go from knowing everyone to not knowing everyone. As a C.E.O., that’s a big one — when people start getting hired and I didn’t write the offer letter for them. Or people start getting hired when you literally have never met them and they walk through the office and I’ll say to someone, “Who is that guy?” That happens now, since new people are joining us every week.

But right now I’m actually in the middle of a process, sort of a personal exercise, to actually shrink the company. Not in terms of head count. But it’s about communication. I’m working really hard to make this something where it doesn’t feel like this unwieldy beast. I know this might sound like a contradiction, but I want to be able to micromanage without micromanaging. I want to come in and really understand the goals of a team, how all the teams are communicating, where are we duplicating our efforts, who are the weak links.

And what are we doing — devoting resources to, and keeping alive, from a product perspective, a tech perspective, a culture perspective — that we shouldn’t be doing anymore? And where can we cut the fat? I don’t think of this as a situation where every year, as a matter of policy, you carve off the bottom 10 percent. But it may manifest itself that way, not necessarily in staffing, but just by focusing on what we want to do as a company. So I’m really trying to shrink it down for myself and getting it to something that’s manageable, where I feel like I have a real handle on everything that’s happening.

Q. Let’s talk about hiring. How do the conversations go when you’re interviewing job candidates? What questions do you ask?

A. When we were just starting out, I was incredibly gut-driven when I was interviewing people. And that was because, as a start-up, we weren’t really able to hire people with good résumés. There was never anyone with good experience we could attract at that point, so you hired the person you felt better about. And I think we made a shift as we grew to start looking much more for specific skills. We need a seller with three years of experience, et cetera. But now I don’t think that was the right way to do things, and we’re making a good shift back to gut-driven hiring.

You sit across the table from someone and usually you know in about 10 or 15 minutes if this person is going to work out. Now you never know the work ethic until they actually start working for you. But I’m making very gut-driven decisions right now. It’s actually the way that I invest at Lerer Ventures, the fund I run with my father, as well. The point is, you’re investing in a person. Yes, they might have a product, and yes, they might have a business. But is it going to evolve and pivot? And do I want to be business partners with this person? That’s the hurdle you need to get over.

And the hiring at Thrillist is very much the same. You sit across the table from someone and talk to them. Does it feel right or doesn’t it feel right? And if it feels right, it is right a vast majority of the time, I’m finding.