The Role of ICT in Office Work Breaks

Abstract

Break activities -- deliberate and unexpected -- are common throughout the working day, playing an important role in the wellbeing of workers. This paper investigates the role of increasingly pervasive ICT in creating new opportunities for breaks at work, what impact the technology has on management of boundaries at work, and the effects these changes have on personal wellbeing. We present a study of the routines of office-workers, where we used images from participants' work-days to prompt and contextualize interviews with them. Analysis of coded photographs and interview data makes three contributions: an account of ubiquitous ICT creating new forms of micro-breaks, including the opportunity to employ previously wasted time; a description of the ways in which staff increasingly bring "home to work"; and a discussion of the emergence of "screen guilt". We evaluate our findings in relation to previous studies, and leave three research implications and questions for future work in this domain.