August 08, 2011 –
Employees who spend their days juggling multiple demands can take comfort knowing they’re part of a burgeoning trend. Multitasking has become the norm in today’s office environments.
When informatics professor Gloria Mark found herself struggling to stay abreast of a constant array of competing tasks, she set out to learn how common this phenomenon is. Last week she shared the results of her research with a rapt audience at the SURF-IT lunchtime seminar series.
Multitasking is part of a larger phenomenon known as “invisible work” – tasks that supervisors don’t always see but are required just to keep up. Mark said many people like to multitask but the majority prefer monochronic work – completing one task before beginning another – a luxury the modern workplace rarely allows.
Why? Technology has made available numerous devices that allow workers to shift quickly among tasks; and increased organizational demands make multitasking a workplace necessity.
Mark’s student researchers conducted field work at a variety of information-oriented offices, including investment management, medical software, aerospace engineering and scientific research companies, in an effort to better understand the trend. All of the sites were marked by fast-paced environments, a high level of pressure and open-office arrangements.
Researchers conducted ethnographic observations for 10 days before spending 3-1/2 days tracking, with stopwatches, the specific actions of 35 employees. “It was quite labor-intensive,” Mark said, adding that “no one has collected data at the level of detail we did.”
After sorting and coding the voluminous data, several patterns emerged. Today’s employees attend fewer formal face-to-face meetings and spend twice as much time at their desks as did their predecessors in the pre-email era. In addition, they switch tasks at a rapid pace; the average time spent per task was just 3 minutes, 5 seconds before employees switched focus or were interrupted.
Researchers also tracked the amount of time subjects spent on individual devices before switching or interruption – an astounding 2 minutes, 11 seconds, on average. “This tells us we need to think about designing computer interfaces that allow people to enter quickly,” Mark said.
Her research also categorized individual tasks into “working spheres,” interrelated events sharing a common goal and specific people, with their own timeframes and unique resources. Results showed the average employee switching spheres every 12 minutes, 18 seconds.
Because interruptions are often the catalyst to changes in task, Mark studied the nature of those as well. Surprisingly, not all interruptions are caused by others. To the contrary, 44 percent are self-created, with a significant number following external interruptions. “It may be that people are accustomed to having external interruptions and as a result, fall into the pattern of self-interrupting more,” Mark explained.
Her research indicated that 82 percent of interrupted work was resumed on the same day, but not until more than 23 minutes later. Additionally, working sphere segments are significantly shorter in the morning, despite no major difference in the number of interruptions. Women appear to be better multitaskers than men, self-interrupting less, experiencing fewer external interruptions and being more likely to resume work when interruptions do occur.
Another finding: workers who are stressed by multiple interruptions work faster than those with fewer interruptions. And surprisingly, Mark said, “informal” interaction amounts to approximately two hours per day, regardless of whether co-workers are in the same office space or in completely different locations.
According to Mark, the data highlights a paradox in the way information systems are designed. “They’re designed to support individual tasks and not the integration of events into working spheres,” she said, pointing to word documents and spread sheets as good examples.
She recently completed the data-gathering phase of another study, this time utilizing workplace sensors in lieu of timers with stopwatches. Mark also got one of the organizations to allow employees to stop sending and receiving email for one week; she’s curious to see how that affects their use of multitasking. “My hypothesis is that they’ll focus longer on tasks,” she said. “So stay tuned.”
–Anna Lynn Spitzer