Multitasking has been growing in popularity up until recently. Scientists and workers are now aware of the myth of multitasking. COVID switch to remote work and post-COVID employee burnout may have accelerated the rise in awareness about the negative effects of multitasking.
Research by the American Psychological Association has shown that context switching while multitasking costs workers 40% of their productive time.
Multitasking is also highly stressful and reduces a person’s short-term memory. Add the longer hours needed to meet the deadlines, and people start feeling resentful, dissatisfied, and burnt out. According to Asana, 71% of knowledge workers fall victim to burnout and this repeats yearly.
Remote workers seem to be suffering the most. This is mostly because they are expected to be highly responsive to prove they are at their workstations doing their job.
Where does that leave your organization? With a workforce that is depleted, unproductive, dissatisfied, and likely to quit. This adds to your losses due to compromised productivity and the cost of new recruitment and onboarding processes.
This article explores the reasons you should not expect multitasking from your remote workforce. It also lists several effective ways to help your employees avoid multitasking and boost their productivity with specialized productivity tracking software.
Remote Work: Why Multitasking Doesn’t Work?
Multitasking doesn’t exist. What we call multitasking is actually rapid task switching. Every time we shift our focus from one task to another, our brain has to adapt. This adaptation costs us a bit of time.
The lost time can amount to several hours, and we can also suffer from “attention residue”. That is when, instead of focusing on the task at hand, our brain still clings to the previous one, disabling us to work properly.
The Downsides of Multitasking
1. It Is not in Our Nature
The human brain is not designed to multitask. Researchers have found that it works best while focusing on one thing at a time. Otherwise, we lose focus, time, productivity, and creativity. So, besides making your employees less efficient, multitasking is also making their work less innovative or engaging.
2. We Don’t Gain Extra Time through It
Doing two tasks at the same time doesn’t mean your employees reduce the amount of time necessary for their completion. If each task needs one full day, your workers will still need two days to deliver them both.
According to Mark, Gudith, and Klocke, a person needs 23 minutes to regain focus after being interrupted. So, eventually, instead of finishing these tasks in two days, your multitasking team will probably take longer.
3. Crushes Employee Morale
Employee morale rapidly weakens when there is a demand to multitask. When starting a task, employees collect the resources and the necessary focus. Every interruption involves the following tiring and discouraging elements:
- The Restart: Collecting the resources and focusing once again.
- The Loss of Momentum: Your employee has invested themselves into a task and then was reassigned to another—this weakens the motivation.
- The Increase of Frustration: Having to restart and reassemble all the ideas is frustrating and reduces employee engagement.
4. Brings an Additional Set of Distractions for Remote Workers
For office workers, chatting to a colleague about a project means no pings on Slack, Teams, etc. For remote workers, messages come in addition to in-person disturbances.
To top it off, the number of video conferences that aim to substitute the informal discussions in the office is huge. All the while, the deadlines remain the same. This is why many remote workers are indirectly forced to multitask. They usually do it during the meetings, which reduces their efficiency in both the meeting and the simultaneous task.
Tips for Maintaining Focus
1. Suggest Time Blocking
Time blocking is when your employees block portions of time for similar tasks.
People usually do this if they want to reduce email notification distractions. So, if your employees are struggling with constant email influx, advise them to block some time for checking emails in the morning and at the end of their workday. In the meantime, encourage pausing email notifications.
2. Use Most Productive Time for Deep Work
Advise your employees to use their most productive time of the workday to dedicate to the most demanding task. Usually, people already know when they can do their best work. If they don’t, an employee monitoring software can help you identify their peak productivity times.
3. Encourage Using the “Do Not Disturb” Option
Reassure your employees it’s okay to use “do not disturb” options on their communication channels whenever they need focus time. Remind them that it is not just their PC apps that can distract them. There are also phone apps that need to be silenced.
4. Set Clear Priorities
To enable your employees to resist multitasking, you need to do your part. Primarily, clearly mark the level of priority for each task. This will help them always choose the right task to focus on and set aside all others. If a new urgent task comes up, make it clear that it’s the top priority and that they should switch to it.
5. Implement an Employee Monitoring Software
This may seem counterproductive to employee satisfaction and loyalty. Still, if you are transparent about the purpose of this software, it can bring many advantages to your team:
- Easy identification of the most frequent interruptions: This way you can implement targeted methods to control these interruptions.
- Early detection of burnout. Powerful monitoring software can detect early signs of burnout, like frequent idle time, absence, and lower productivity. With this knowledge, you can provide constructive and timely help to your employees and prevent employee turnover.
- Simple surveillance of remote workers without micromanagement. Monitoring software gives you instant insight into and proof of your employees’ work. It also allows your employees to turn off notifications and dedicate their time to deep work without worrying about not answering your messages within minutes. In short, these applications actually improve employer-employee trust.
Multitasking has been exposed as nothing but a business world myth. To really help your employees stay satisfied and do their best, provide the right environment for truly efficient work.
The methods we listed are the first step in fighting the interruption culture and the myth of multitasking. They will help your company reach maximum productivity and competitiveness.
