The Lousy Multitasker

(This article was published in Managing for Society, The Manila Times, on 24 February 2015)

“The core of the problem is that they think they are great at what they do; and they’ve convinced everybody else that they’re good at it, too.”

(Prof. Clifford Nass, Stanford University)

The changes in todays’ business environment have made work and tasks increasingly complex. Competitive pressures have constantly compelled organizations to “do more with less.” Organizations value employees that can handle multiple tasks at the same time. Talent selection has also moved towards the preference of candidates with multi-tasking skills. Employees are expected to engage in a variety of tasks, activities, and roles that they must handle simultaneously.

With multiple tasks at hand, employees differ in how these are achieved. Some prefer dealing with tasks all at the same time, while other might choose to focus on one task before becoming involved with another.

When confronted with multiple streams of information, a person’s ability to focus is naturally impaired. The ability to recall information, or to switch seamlessly from one task to another is also affected. By switching attention between and among tasks, productivity is wasted. The human brain exhibits a “response selection bottleneck” as it decides which information or activity to prioritize. Skimming becomes the default resulting in things not studied in depth.

Research conducted at Stanford University in 2009 revealed multi-tasking as less productive than doing a single thing at a time. Before the tests, participants who are multitaskers considered their preference for doing things as an advantage. After they were subjected to a series of tests, results showed that the performance of multitaskers were worse than those who prefer to do a single task at a time. Multitaskers exhibit difficulty organizing their thoughts and filtering out irrelevant information. They were also slower at switching from one task to another. One of the professors was quoted, “Multitaskers were just lousy at everything.”

IBM conducted a survey among 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries. This was in 2010. The CEOs identified creativity as the most crucial factor for future success. In organizations, new problems often require novel solutions. Restructuring or demolition of conventions is imperative. Employees exhibiting creativity contributes to organizational motivation, effectiveness and survival.

In “Time is Money: Polychronicity as a Predictor of Performance Across All Job Levels,” researchers failed to find a relationship between multi-tasking and innovativeness or creativity. Two years after, a journal article in 2014 published by the American Psychological Association echoed this conclusion. Apparently, as single-taskers only concentrate and focus on one task at a time, they have sufficient opportunity available to think creatively. In contrast, the attention of multitaskers shifts from one task to another. They allocate less time to each single task, depriving themselves of the opportunity to think creatively.

In 2005, the University of London found that multi-tasking lowers a person’s IQ. Conducted by its Institute of Psychiatry, the study documented the decline of IQ scores of participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks. The declines are similar to what is expected when one stayed up all night or smoked marijuana.

The drop in the scores placed them at the average IQ range of an 8-year-old.

Ah! We know a lot of them.

 

 

The Show

(This article was published in Managing for Society, The Manila Times, on 03 February 2015)

Meetings are ineffective.

Partly due to improvements in technology, costs of organizing and conducting meetings have dropped significantly. Ironically, the number of meetings has also increased. A recent study of 17 large corporations in the United States revealed that one large company spent 300,000 hours a year in meetings. On average, 15 percent of an organization’s collective time is spent on meetings.

As an organizational tool, meetings serve a variety of purposes. In theory, they are organized for decision-making, training of employees, sharing of information, brainstorming, coordination of activities, problem solving, among others. In practice, there is a perpetual attempt to achieve these purposes. However, there is at least one claim that more than one-third of time spent on meetings is not necessarily productive. Moreover, up to two-thirds of these meetings may fail to meet their intended goals. Most employees, as participants, perceive meetings as ineffective and a total waste of time.

A survey of various popular research results has validated what most employees have long suspected. Although participation in meetings is required, employees felt that most meetings have little or no relevance in the performance of their work.

In most meetings, the agenda is general and boring. Notwithstanding that this could be distributed in advance, participants have to guess the purpose of the meeting. The agenda lists the contents but seldom the objectives. This is especially true when meetings are routine.

Most participants are not prepared. Since the objective is unclear, they would limit themselves, at most, to minimal research and waste time with the most basic questions in the meeting. Some artificially mimic intelligence by rephrasing or summarizing preceding points. Others parrot and echo the dominant view.

With no explicit objectives and a bunch of clueless participants, the focus is on discussions, not decisions. The wish is that directions will emerge from the discourse. These meetings are often cloaked in egalitarian sounding labels such as “dialogue”, “group discussion”, “information sharing,” “learning group,” etc.

As a result, it is no surprise that most employees are faking it in meetings. In “Less Acting, More Doing”, researchers call this surface acting. It is defined as faking one’s appropriate emotions to fit a context. When an employee puts on the nicest smile even when he is frustrated with the discussion, his expression is not consistent with his internal emotional state. Published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, the article posits that faking one’s emotions takes away one’s ability to pay attention in meetings. When participants believe that they are not free to express dissent in a meeting, the meeting is perceived as ineffective. Employees who surface act end up emotionally exhausted. Some signify strong intent to leave the organization.

According to the Virginia Carilion Research Institute, social cues in meetings trigger responses from participants that impair mental processes and debilitate problem solving abilities. In a way, it confirmed the perception that meetings do not only make us “feel dead”, they make us “brain dead” as well.

Perhaps this explains why the most common question when a meeting is called is…

“What’s the food?”