Virtual Office Resource

We’ve learned to eat, work, even sleep if we could, on the go. But a new study by enterprise mobility firm iPass (News - Alert) has uncovered more potential danger to this than driving off the road while texting, according to a story by Todd Haselton (News - Alert) at bgr.com.

The study found that mobile workers suffer more mental and physical challenges than their corporate office counterparts. Even worse, on average, they work 240 more hours per year (five hours more per week) than their sedentary peers.

A story by Dino Londis posted at informationweek.com confirms that mobile employees exercise less and expect to suffer emotionally if they don't have their smartphones on all the time. The down time we all were used to before being connected all the time is gone, causing this physical and mental stress.

The iPass study surveyed 2,300 employees at 1,100 companies worldwide and found that mobile devices have increased the pressure that information workers feel to perform since they are technically never “out of the office,” or unavailable.  Slightly less than 60 percent of the mobile workers studied exercised sporadically or not at all with an actual 60 per cent of the non-exercisers blaming work for their inactivity. Another 20 percent blamed not enough  time.

Sleep patterns were disrupted as well with 62 percent of the respondents reporting less than seven hours of sleep per night and 52 percent feeling that their job affected their quality of sleep.

Even more distressing, Haselton writes, the study found that “40 percent of mobile workers would feel disoriented if they didn’t have a smartphone for a week, 34 percent would feel distraught and 10 percent would feel lonely.”

“Lack of exercise combined with less hours of sleep is a recipe for a health and productivity disaster within a corporation. Simply incorporating treadmill desks at corporate headquarters, satellite and home offices would allow workers to reduce stress, exercise more, and sleep better boosting productivity and lowering health care costs,” said Steve Bordley, an executive at a company that sells exercise equipment.

Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM (News - Alert) in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.