Old habits die hard in the office. The latest annual study from The Pew Research Center exploring productivity in the connected era has found that workers continue to rely on traditional communications channels more than ever even as technology moves forward at an accelerating pace.

Over 60 percent of the 535 working adults who participated in the survey ranked email as “very important” for doing their jobs, continuing the pattern from previous years. That figure shoots up to 78 percent among office-based employees, who are also more likely to favor landline phones over mobile devices than the general working population, with a full 47 percent preferring hard-wired to wireless devices.

But the importance of smartphones and tablets varies greatly from worker to worker. Factors such as billing, which is a notorious pain point when it comes to business calls on personal devices, can make the landline more convenient for employees who spend most of their time in the office. Office dwellers who take work home, however, are more likely to favor their own handsets over the company telephone for the very same logistical reasons.

Among the white-collar workers who said they telecommute on a regular basis, Pew says that a full two-thirds rank smartphones as “very important” to their professional activity along with the web. The research firm got similar answers from the broader respondent pool, with 59 percent of all employed Internet users who work remotely ticking the same box and another one-quarter rating mobile devices as “somewhat important” to their jobs.

The growing number of telecommuters is clearly contributing to the increasing importance of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, but the same can’t be said for social networks. Only four percent of the respondents said sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are “very important” to their jobs. Among office workers, the figure was only three points higher.

The different segments also agree that the Internet is not nearly as big of a distraction as their bosses might fear. Only nine percent of office dwellers and three percent of non-office workers said that the web hurts their productivity, while 46 percent of respondents said that their productivity has improved. At the same time, 39 percent reported that digital tools such as email afford them more flexible hours.

But that increased freedom comes at a cost, with 35 percent of the participants in the study saying that they work more as a result of being connected. The number grows to 47 percent among office workers, but Pew discovered that they are also twice as likely to enjoy a more flexible work schedule as their blue-collar peers thanks to web access and mobility.