The dangers of multitasking received some attention on the heels of a report published by the British Institute of Psychiatry back in 2005. In addition to finding that multitasking erodes productivity, it also found amusing impacts which it likened to smoking pot and taking 10 points off of an employees IQ. The brief BBC account is here. Since that time a variety of executive coaches have picked up on this and recently I received a note from Tony Robbins on this. A few new thoughts are offered in this blog post that also raises the specter that multitasking is valued because people reportedly good at it have sold everyone else on their greatness. Link is here. One more blog I particularly like is here.
So why is this important beyond a helpful personal tip? I see this over and over again, particularly in back office and support organizations which feature less structured work. The issue is often associated with email overload. Internal service providers perceive a service level requirement related to how quickly they reply to emails from their internal customers. Microsoft has fed this with alerts that flash up when emails are received along with the ever present Blackberry, etc. In this environment, I have seen individuals divert to email interrupts every 5 minutes. It absolutely destroys productivity but staff often feel as if they have had great days and have served their internal customers. The question is whether they actually accomplished anything. Now just multiply this times 100 people. Yes, this is real productivity.
Some of the academic studies suggest that around 2 hours per day is lost to poor multitasking. From my personal observations, this seems reasonable and probably even low. This represents a 25% opportunity on the productivity side. For most companies, there will be no other single opportunity this large. The problem is how to realize improvements.
If you run a back office or support organization, this topic is worth some commitment of time. Just sending around a tip sheet recommending that people turn off email alerts will not do much on its own. The technology is just an enabler of the bad business practice, not the cause. It is likely that internal customer organizations and even your own management team are sending some very direct messages which reinforce poor productivity. It is also likely that your goal setting and performance evaluation system is viewed by business managers as something inflicted by HR. You get to the end of an evaluation period and managers ding people based on that memorable tiff with an internal customer despite the fact that all written goals were achieved. More often than not, it requires going back to the drawing board in terms of customer priorities and measures. Based on this, changes to roles and responsibilities are likely and may need organizational changes to best implement.
These are not easy changes, but make a huge impact. These also tend to yield significant increases in employee engagement. Just keep this in mind before you go off and spend millions on the latest technology program which attempts to generate a 5% improvement.
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