Multitasking and Productivity in the Workplace

Prof Isamah

Multitasking has become one of the more common buzzwords today and it essentially refers to the apparent simultaneous performance of two or more tasks by an individual in the work situation. Although not restricted to the workplace only, it is my belief that it is in the work environment where multitasking has its greatest potential impact. Consider the following scenario conjured up by Josua Rubenstein:

What are you doing right now as you read this article? Ordering supplies for the office from your distribution warehouse? Monitoring a screen for production equipment performance? Getting an e-mail back to your colleagues in the Denver office? Carrying on Instant Message conversations with three co-workers? Writing up a report in Word for the meeting on Wednesday? Eating the lunch you never have time to leave the desk for? Opening and reading traditional mail? Filing an in-house memo to Tech Services because your browser is acting up? Making a list of the clients you're expected to reach by close-of-business today? Trying to resize the fonts in the company newsletter so it fits on one page?

This scenario is very familiar to the average modern worker and is possible because modern digital devices such as e-mail messaging and cell phones make possible the simultaneous engagement of one individual in a number of work tasks. Multitasking here implies both doing more than one task at a time as well as switching among tasks. Unfortunately, modern conditions under which most companies operate require that they do more with less which in turn requires that employees not only take on more tasks or even jobs but also perform these jobs efficiently.

There is some disagreement among researchers about the consequences for work efficiency and productivity of multitasking. Does it improve productivity or decrease it?

There can be no doubt that multitasking is to some degree productive. Many of us are quite capable of juggling between tasks and managing to accomplish them with some relatively high degree of efficiency. However, there is research evidence that multitasking has a significant cost to both the employee and the company. In a set of studies by a team at the University of California at Irvine, 36 office workers were tracked and a minute by minute record was kept of how they spent their time. The researchers found that the employees devoted an average of just 11 minutes to a project before the ping of an e-mail, the ring of the phone or a knock on the cubicle pulled them in another direction. Once they were interrupted, it took, on average, stunning 25 minutes to return to the original task - if they managed to do so at all that day. The workers in the study were juggling an average of 12 projects apiece - a situation one subject described as constant, multitasking craziness. The five biggest causes of interruption in descending order according to the researchers were: a colleague stopping by, the worker being called away from the desk (or leaving voluntarily), the arrival of new e-mail, the worker switching to another task on the computer and a phone call (cited from Time magazine article of January 16, 2006 by Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe).

The issue of switching from task to task and back again to the original task was taken up by an earlier pioneering research by Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans (Human Perception and Performance, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27(4) 2001). According to these researchers, our capacity for multitasking has its limits. Their study showed that participants lost time in performance speed when switching tasks and they lost more time as the tasks increased in complexity. However, when the tasks were easier, in the sense that participants found them familiar, their time of completion speeded up. The lesson here is that while multitasking might seem an important solution to the problem associated with company layoffs and downsizing, it does have its limits. In fact, a long history of psychological research has shown that with increasing number of tasks, performance inevitably declines and stress among workers tends to rise.

Source: Isamah, Augustine (nd). http://www.specialisedservices.co.za/Multitasking_Productivity.html. Retrieved August 10, 2011.