This is a guest blog post from Tamara McCleary, CEO at Thulium.co.
What is the attention span of a goldfish?
9 seconds.
What is the attention span of the average human?
8 seconds.
According to a study by Microsoft, the average human being now has an attention span of eight seconds.
That’s down from 12 seconds in 2000.
Where is our attention going?
Technology.
So what’s happening in our organizations and on the job? How is our decreased attention affecting our work? Our innovation? Our ability to focus and concentrate?
How To’s? Download it here => How to Wake Up from the Nightmare of Workplace Technology Distraction, Citrix’s white paper featuring research by Forrester. (It’s un-gated, so I’ve just saved you time. You’re welcome.)
Too crunched for time to feel effective and efficient, little alone disruptive and innovative? I get it. I’m guilty as charged. I understand distraction. I live distraction. I’m the CEO of a global social media agency, and I’m overwhelmed with emails piling up in my inbox that need returning, multiple global campaigns running simultaneously for multiple clients, employee issues, managing a geographically disparate workforce responsible for social media programs and messaging for clients with a presence in over 180 countries, serial conference calls from 6 a.m. to midnight, meetings (oy the meetings and conference calls per day!), and then life outside of work — did I mention I’m a mother, a wife, and carry an extensive international travel schedule? Who cares? You’re too busy, too. I’m preaching to the choir here. We eat distraction for breakfast. In fact, I might be a distraction subject matter expert, or did I mean distracted subject matter expert?
Ahhhh the modern lives we lead with modern conveniences … and just think how much less we have to do now that technology has lifted our burdens (or has it?). Just like the invention of the washing machine, think of how much more time we now have since we don’t have to bang our clothes against rocks to get them clean. Interesting to note that when a new technology enters the picture to “lighten our loads,” we end up even busier doing even more things with the time we’ve been given back.
You know you’re distracted when:
- You frequently check email or send a text or a Slack message while on conference calls.
- When someone is talking to you, you think about something else and lose chunks of their conversation.
- You lack organization. Your desk looks like a bomb went off. Your closet isn’t faring any better. You can’t find the shoes or the jacket or the whatever you want at the time you want it.
- You’re frequently late logging into conference calls, and you’re often late for meetings and appointments.
- Your friends tell you dinner is at 7 when they make reservations for 7:30.
- You often space making appointments for yourself or your kids — the dentist, the pediatrician, your annual wellness check, your colonoscopy. (That last one was just for entertainment value. If you’re under 45 the joke will be lost on you.)
Yeah, now that big orange goldfish is smugly staring at us. What a jerk!
So how do we create a modern workplace that is harnessing technology to increase efficiencies, and streamline workloads? How about that promise of relieving us of our mundane tasks, and helping us collaborate across business units? And for those business leaders tasked with growing the business like I am with running our organization, how do we meet the needs of the future workforce, those digital natives, and use technology to support engaging our employees instead of adding to the digital distraction? And — cherry on top — how do we create a workplace that delivers on the promise of a positive employee experience?
Truth be told, we’re all technology addicts. We use technology, we depend on technology, and we demand technology continue to meet our every whim and desire. Just ask any IT executive. <Casting a knowing wink your way.>
Every sector and industry has undergone disruption. Shiny objects and sexy new algorithms have captured our attention and budgets. Casting a spotlight into the bowels of the organization, the big question is …
Is technology helping or hindering our performance at work?
I recently interviewed veteran industry analyst Jack Gold on this topic. He had some exceptional insights into not only the problems, but refreshingly, he had answers and “fixes” so I wanted to share them and him with you. Below are my questions and his answers:
Jack, you write and talk a lot about employee engagement and distraction in the modern workspace environment with respect to how it’s harming efficiencies and overall business outcomes. In fact, you’re writing a white paper due to publish soon regarding your research into the topic of digital distraction. Looking at the modern workforce, I’m curious about the toll being taken with respect to our technology addiction and subsequent distraction at work. Specifically, I think of all the apps we have in the workplace and the constant interruption and even the time it takes to switch between these applications. Through your research, what insights can you share with us regarding the context switch distractions. I think last time we talked, you called them “Switcheroo problems!”
I estimate that an average enterprise user will switch between six and 10 apps in a typical day to get his or her job done. This app switching can negatively affect the user’s productivity by five to 10 minutes for each. If we assume a user switches apps 10 times per day, that’s a productivity loss of 50-100 minutes, plus another 20-50 minutes just waiting for the apps to open on first use. In a modern workspace environment. I estimate the average worker can save 90 percent of that time and recover that lost productivity, saving the company as much as $15K per year per employee.
Another pain point in our modern workspace environment is the lack of unification for access to the tools employees need. What advice do you have to overcome the challenge of getting the best app for the job?
Many companies are challenged in provisioning the best app for a particular task to all users. Getting new apps to users can take 6-12 months to develop and another six months to fully deploy across the enterprise. Properly designed apps can increase user productivity and need to get into user hands expeditiously. If we assume a 5 percent productivity improvement when the new app is available, and we can get it provisioned to all users in three months rather than six months, then the productivity improvement alone in an organization with 10K users can provide a return of over $3M!
Where do you see technology falling short and even exacerbating the challenges in our modern workspace environment?
To protect their environments, companies require frequent password changes, and in many organizations, each app has to have a new password created every three months. While this is important to overall security, it is a real productivity burden to end users. Moving to a single sign-on approach in a modern workspace environment, where only one password needs to be changed instead of the 10+ needed for individual apps, can provide a return to the organization of over $1M recovered from no longer having to deal with that lost productivity. In addition, moving to a SSO capability can return more than $5M in IT related costs that are no longer needed to deal with the issues of password changes and help desk calls for lost passwords.
In addition to the password and sign-on nightmare, Jack talked about making searches intelligent: I estimate that a typical knowledge workers spend 15 percent to 20 percent of his/her workday simply looking for the right information to get their job done. Making searches more productive by advanced search options in a modern workspace environment can cut that time by at least 50 percent and provide as much as a $3M in recovered productivity in a 10K employee organization.
Want to learn more? Check out the on-demand webinar — The tie between modern digital workspaces and employee experience — I recently did with Jack and Vishal Ganeriwala, Sr. Director, Product Marketing Workspace Services, at Citrix. We dive deeper into this topic and the research from Forrester on waking up from the nightmare of workplace technology distraction.
And stay tuned for more. This is the first blog a series of three I’m devoting to this topic. What focus! LOL!
