Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity

https://hbr.org/2021/09/collaboration-overload-is-sinking-productivity

Cognitive psychologists have shown that the act of simply responding to a text can impose as much as a 64-second recovery time to get back on track. As Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has shown in her research, it can take us as many as 23 minutes to get fully back on task after a slightly longer interruption. With practice, people do get better at adjusting to interruptions, but this adaptability comes at a cost: People who are frequently interrupted experience a higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressures, and have to exert more effort.

Unfortunately, Covid has driven switching costs through the roof. Meetings have moved from one hour to 30 minutes as most try to cram more collaboration into a given day. IMs have become a more frequent sources of switching costs, with exchanges carrying deeper into the night — for example, one company has seen IMs rise 52% between 6 p.m. and 12 p.m.”

“most organizations were more concerned with engaging virtual employees by piling on more meetings and emails. In contrast, General Mills had appropriate analytics in place to know this would have absolutely been the wrong thing to do — the correlation between fragmented time and both negative mood and employee fatigue was .55, meaning there was a very significant impact of collaborative overload on employee well-being.