Much has been written about how well productivity stood up to the challenges of employees working from home during the pandemic. The numbers looked good on paper, with organisations claiming no fall in productivity and in some cases an improvement.
But would the numbers continue to stack up when the immediacy of Covid passed and would employees be able to maintain their focus in a post-pandemic world?
“There was a flurry of data suggesting that it was all going brilliantly at the start but the longer it went on, the more the evidence began raising real questions about it,” says Dr John McMackin of DCU’s Business School. “The data to date about enhanced productivity when working remotely is mixed and it seems to depend on the context, the type of work being undertaken and it also varies by individual.”
One of the key factors contributing to productivity is maintaining focus. Lack of focus costs time and money, especially in knowledge-based sectors where productivity is linked to workers having blocks of distraction-free time to concentrate on specific tasks.
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Distraction-free time sounds great in theory but it’s thin on the ground when the time absorbed by emails, messages, meetings and personal interruptions is added up.
According to a new report on post-pandemic knowledge worker productivity, each worker loses an estimated 553 hours a year to distractions whether they work at home or in the office. Managers come off even worse, losing an average of 683 hours to distractions annually with unproductive meetings and repetitive administrative tasks as the biggest culprits.
The report, In Search of Lost Focus, was commissioned by file hosting company, Dropbox, and produced by Economist Impact which is part of the Economist Group. The report was based on a survey sample of more than 1,000 knowledge workers across retail, manufacturing and technology sectors in 10 countries.
Dropbox is a virtual-first company, which means that remote working is the primary experience for all employees, so anything that gets in the way of workflow is a cause for concern. But Dropbox is not alone. Loss of focus costs businesses everywhere hundreds of hours in downtime and quite a lot of money every year.
Chat apps are seen as a boon for collaboration but, according to the report, they also account for a huge loss in focus time at an average of 157 hours per knowledge worker per year. It puts the annual financial cost of loss of focus at an average of $37,000 (€35,000) per manager grade and $21,000 for other roles.
When these losses are taken collectively, “American companies leave close to half a trillion dollars on the table because of time-sucking distractions that affect deep, focused work”. The estimated figure for Ireland is roughly $40 billion.
Disrupting focus
“Hazards to focus differ by work environment,” the report adds. “On-site workers cite face-to-face interruptions as their worst distraction, while remote workers single out household chores and demands from others sharing their space.
“Regardless of location, all workers wrestle with disruptions from meetings, emails and chat messages.”
Data from Irish respondents shows that about half of all knowledge workers don’t spend more than an hour at a time on a task without an interruption and more than 40 per cent have real difficulty setting aside dedicated focus time.
More than a third reckon that a fifth of the time they spend in meetings, including virtual ones, is wasted and while they believe that remote collaboration tools are useful in reducing the need for in-person meetings, they have a downside as they create pressure to respond to incoming messages quickly and make people feel they have to be always available.
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With AI now coming at us faster than the Shanghai Maglev, an interesting statistic thrown up by the report is that three-quarters of Irish knowledge employees are already using automation tools, including AI, in their work. Improved productivity, time saving on repetitive tasks and being more organised were cited as some of the immediate benefits with workers seeing AI as an aid to focus, not a job threat.
The general takeaway from the report is that a mix of flexible working arrangements, workplace policies that promote focus time, AI-powered tools and asynchronous communication are all positive ways of improving focus and productivity.
Working environment
Working environments need to be fit for purpose which means having a suitable space, equipment and tech support at home while offices need quiet spaces for focused work. Companies also need to think about implementing strategies to combat distractions such as meeting-free periods and dedicated daily focus time.
It also seems that it pays off to let people work where they work best. “It’s not where someone works that matters most, it’s how they work,” the report says, and the more control employees are given over their working schedule and environment the better the outcomes.
That’s the “talk”. But as McMackin points out, the “walk” may be also be influenced by other factors.
“The two biggest individual level predictors of performance at work are conscientiousness and cognitive ability; broadly speaking, higher levels of both predict higher performance in most jobs in traditional settings,” he says.
“Cognitive ability is the same remotely, but conscientiousness seems likely to have more powerful effects in a remote world, with conscientious people likely to continue to perform to the same standard as they would face to face, while people lower in conscientiousness may be less productive in a remote work environment.”
