Multitasking has become a business buzzword over the last few years. The idea behind multitasking is to have employees perform a number of different tasks with the end goal of being more productive. Greater productivity should translate into more black on the bottom line.
It is amazing that companies have bought into this mentality of, “the more work an employee does, the greater their value to the company’s bottom line.” Research conducted years ago with MIT students showed that multitasking leads to a lower quality of work, in some cases resulting in significant mistakes being made. It can be safely presumed that MIT has some of the brightest minds in the world attending, so intelligence is not a factor in determining the effectiveness of multitasking.
The human mind is not designed to work at peak efficiency when having to deal with a number of different tasks. Employees may appear to be multitasking when they are, in effect, seeking shortcuts that will lower the quality of the result. The jobs are done, but is the quality the same? Also to be factored into the equation is the effect multitasking has on the employee. Constantly demanding a person to work in a multitasking environment will burn them out sooner rather than later.
If multitasking is taken out of its common definition of doing multiple tasks simultaneously and put in a different context, true multitasking takes place in a company more often than managers realize. One example is the creative people. This group needs to have multiple projects to work on because at some point, the creative process runs into a wall, and they need to pause to solve a problem. Instead of making it look like they are working, people in this category of employees can work on a second project and devote their full attention to the task at hand. The first project is still being worked on, but will likely move forward by solving the problem on a lunch break or during another non-work related activity.
Clearly, not every employee has this ability. This is one of the primary reasons trying to incorporate multitasking as a company standard or goal can actually result in lost productivity or a reduction in quality. Being able to accurately define each employee’s strengths will allow management to maximize productivity.
There is also the dollar issue to consider. Paying employees for multitasking, a practice that seems to make sense because the employee is doing a number of jobs for the cost a single employee, artificially inflates the value of the employee. The reason for this is there is a lower quality result that is often accepted as the trade off for the savings. In addition, multitasking has been shown to make focusing more difficult for employees when they are not in multitasking mode. Therefore, productivity is lost on both ends of the attempt to make multitasking an across-the-board reality.
From both the research and practical sides of multitasking, it should be used sparingly and only put in the hands of employees who demonstrate the prerequisite ability of being able to manage multiple projects and treating each of them on a separate time schedule. Though creativity is a significant characteristic for the multitasking employee, there are other qualities such as excellent organizational skills that may also come into consideration.
However management chooses to integrate multitaskers in their company environment, the selection process for both the employee and the projects must be given careful consideration if they want to maximize productivity and employee value.
