Working 9-5?: professional differences in email and boundary management practice

Cecchinato, Marta, Cox, Anna and Bird, Jon (2015) Working 9-5?: professional differences in email and boundary management practice. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 3989-3998. ISBN 9781450331456

[img]
Preview
Text
p3989-cecchinato.pdf - Published Version

Download (861kB) | Preview
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702537

Abstract

Technology not only brings benefits such as flexible working practices but can also have negative stressful consequences such as increasing email overload and the blurring of work-home boundaries. We report on an exploratory study that extends the current understanding of email usage by investigating how different professions at a university manage work and personal emails using different devices and how this impacts their work-home boundary management. Our findings lead us to identify two user groups: those with permeable boundaries (primarily academics) and those who have more rigid ones (primarily professional services employees) and that there are differences in when, where and how they manage their work and personal emails. In particular we find that some participants use micro-boundary strategies to manage transitions between work and personal life. Based on these novel findings we propose improvements of email software design to facilitate effective email, work-home boundary management, and support micro-boundary practices.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: Email; work and personal email; email overload; crossdevice interaction; boundary management; work-home interference
Subjects: G900 Others in Mathematical and Computing Sciences
L900 Others in Social studies
Department: Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Computer and Information Sciences
Depositing User: Becky Skoyles
Date Deposited: 09 Mar 2018 14:43
Last Modified: 01 Aug 2021 08:35
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/33668

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics