Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 and Work

Cary L. Cooper, Cary L. Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000337297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

In the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series, international experts introduce important themes in psychological science that engage with people's unprecedented experience of the pandemic, drawing together chapters as they originally appeared before COVID-19 descended on the world.

This timely and accessible book brings together a selection of chapters offering insights into issues surrounding work and the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring content on topics such as health and wellbeing, work-family, flexible hours, organisational communication, talent management, recovery from work, employee engagement and flourishing, burnout, and organisational interventions, the book includes a specially written introduction contextualising the chapters in relation to the COVID-19 crisis. Reflecting on how psychological research is relevant during a significant global event, the introduction examines the potential future impact of the pandemic on the practice and study of psychology and our lives more generally.

Featuring theory and research on key topics germane to the global pandemic, the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series offers thought-provoking reading for professionals, students, academics and policy makers concerned with the psychological consequences of COVID-19 for individuals, families and society.

1
The balanced communications diet for business

Principles for working smarter, not harder in a connected world

Nicola J. Millard

The problem of workus interruptus

Did you know that during an average working day we are allegedly interrupted once every three minutes (Mark et al., 2008) … oh, hang on my phone just beeped … now, where was I?

With agile and flexible working we may not be tethered to our offices or desks anymore, but the devices we have on us constantly have blurred the boundaries between our work life and the rest of our life. We have the pressure of responding to a multitude of beeps and buzzes whether we are in the boardroom, on the beach or in the bathroom. Communication is essential for healthy life and good business decisions, but being overwhelmed by communication is not. Just like food is essential for survival, too much of it can be bad for us.

Don’t get me wrong, these technologies have made our working lives better in many ways. For a start, they put us in control of where, when and how we work. They are the foundation for flexible, agile and home working. They have changed the ways that we communicate and collaborate forever. The challenge isn’t connection anymore; it is disconnection.

It may be easier to abstain from technology use outside the workplace but, when we often carry our offices around with us in our back pockets, disconnection can be challenging. It is more difficult than ever to define when we are working, and when we are not. This “always on” way of life can cause “techno-stress” – i.e. “stress caused by an inability to cope with the demands of organisational technology usage” (Tarafdar et al., 2010). To help combat this, we developed a set of simple principles – a “balanced communications diet for business” – to help us to become healthier and more productive in work.

When are we most productive?

“Productivity” is often defined in manufacturing terms as “the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it” (Hill, 1993). This is a simple concept when applied to a factory production line but, particularly when applied to knowledge work, it becomes more problematic. The only tangible input is the number of hours worked. Output is less easy to define. If people equate a clear email inbox, or constant availability on instant messenger, with productivity then that is probably what employees do all day. Is this really “productive work”?

In an attempt to understand productivity, BT and Cambridge University conducted a set of employee interviews (Mieczakowski et al., 2011). There were a wide variety of answers to the question “Where, when and why are you most productive at work?”

• “I find I get a full day of work done between 6:00 and 9:30 in the morning. For my sanity as well, knowing I can get at least two productive hours of work in before breakfast, makes a huge difference to my day.”
• “In the evening, hands down. Less interruptions and my natural time clock is at its peak then.”
• “For ideas – it’s before 9.30 am. For acting on those ideas, 10 am to 3 pm.”
• “I need peace and quiet – interruptions just jumble my brain up and I get nothing done.”
• “On a plane – it’s the only safe haven now from calls and emails. Sadly, even that’s changing now!”
• “I do all my thinking in the car – I have an hour’s commute – once I get to the office it’s all go, go, go! Do I want to work from home? No, I’d lose all that thinking time!”
• “I can tell you where I’m NOT productive – being tugged in all different places sitting in a ‘team’ set-up office with no privacy or physical barriers between myself and others.”

The general theme that emerges from these answers – aside from “everyone is different” – is that people regard themselves as most productive when they are free of interruption. This is often outside the office and the traditional 9-to-5 day. The problem is frequently that we can’t get through the work for talking about the work. However, if you rephrase this question and ask people what motivates them about work over and above the money that they earn, they say that they “like the people that they work with”. These people, one assumes, are also generally the source of many of these interruptions!

A significant amount of research supports the idea that having time to think and reflect each day does a great deal for well-being, and constant interruptions can counter this (Mieczakowski et al., 2011; Tams et al., 2018; Galluch et al., 2015). This is the time that we seem to value, if the answers to these questions are to be believed. People who are always “plugged-in” often don’t get this vital mental downtime. We all seem to recognise that we need peace and quiet sometimes to just think. But finding the time to do this can be easier said than done. We always seem to put a higher value on action rather than inaction. The value of reflection is underrated because business is so concerned with action and activity – things that are easy to measure – rather than thinking about action, which looks too much like staring into space.

This “cult of busyness” also means that we tend to get tugged in all directions during our working day. We can feel out of control. People are most likely to become enthusiastic about what they are doing when they are free to make decisions about the way that they do it. Classic psychology (Karasek & Theorell, 1990) tells us that high levels of demand and low levels of perceived control results in stress, burnout and emotional exhaustion.

Control is easier on some communication devices than others. It’s easy to find the off switch on a laptop; but less so on a smart phone. Because we often can’t be seen at our desks, or in the office anymore, there can be a pressure to be always on. Control can take other forms, though. Minimising distractions and interruptions could be one way of both taking control and becoming more productive.

Brain juggling

There is one thing that acts strongly against us simply choosing to switch off. Technology plays to the natural distractibility of human nature and our compulsion to embrace uncertainty and novelty (Fitz et al., 2019). Every time the new mail notification flashes up on screen, the red dot appears against an app, or our phone vibrates, we feel the need to take a look, regardless of what else we are doing. The vast majority of these alerts lead us to irrelevant, routine or junk stuff. However, there is the occasional “reward” – an important document or good news – that motivates us to keep checking for incoming messages even when we should really be paying attention to other things (like walking in a straight line or being at a meeting). In addition, the accomplishment we feel when we reach the end of our email inbox or send that witty tweet tends to be easier to achieve than doing all those other, more complex tasks on our “to do” list.

One problem with this is that the frequency of distraction is inversely correlated with productivity (Duke and Monta, 2017; Fitz et al., 2019). As we compulsively check incoming messages, the less productive we become. A number of studies have also cited a close relationship between stress and the amount of times we check our devices (e.g. Lee et al., 2014; Brod, 1984; Thomee et al., 2011). Turning alerts off is an obvious solution, but there is evidence that this can make people more anxious, as FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) kicks in (Fitz et al., 2019). The most stressed individuals can even imagine “phantom” alerts and compulsively check their devices even when there is nothing coming in (Kruger & Djerf, 2017).

One of the big reasons that technology is more distracting now than it used to be is that the alerts from devices are increasingly social in nature. Devices alert us to messages, voicemails and even the locations of our friends and colleagues, whereas previously they might only send out alerts when they were out of batteries. These social alerts are hard to tune out. You can ignore the ping of a washing machine when it has finished a spin cycle, but you can’t ignore your boss. This tends to result in us attempting to multitask.

Multitasking (attempting to perform two or more tasks simultaneously), or task switching (when you are interrupted mid-task) are effectively the mental equivalent of juggling. If you have ever closed your laptop down at the end of the day and found a multitude of half-finished email replies, chat sessions and half-completed documents, you have probably been doing one or the other. Academics have long known that task-switching has a detrimental effect on productivity, even for simple tasks (e.g. Rogers & Monsell, 1995). The results are even worse for complex tasks (e.g. Rubinstein et al., 2001). Although switch costs may be small, sometimes just a few tenths of a second per switch, they can add up to large amounts of time wasted when people switch repeatedly back and forth between tasks. Task switching can also impede memory and knowledge retention, particularly for interruptions mid-task. Interruptions reduce our ability to pay attention (Ophir et al., 2009), complete tasks, reduce task accuracy (Montag & Walla, 2016), and increases the time we take to complete tasks (Cellier & Eyrolle, 1992).

This means that multitasking may look productive, but it may actually take more time and involve more errors. Research from Stanford University (Ophir et al., 2009) has shown that people who regard themselves as good at multitasking are generally worse at judging the quality of information that they are reading and worse at recalling what they have done. This means that they are often less productive than people who are single taskers.

Multitasking can also be exhausting (Mark et al., 2008; Monicque et al., 2009). Paying attention to one thing whilst doing another means that we need to do more work to maintain any level of attention on either task. Sitting in a meeting doing email on your phone generally means either the meeting or the email gets short shrift. The lesson here? The average person is generally unaware of the cognitive effect that technology is having on their life.

Ultimately, much of this boils down to stress because of the sheer number of things that are simultaneously competing for our attention – “information overload” (Tarafdar et al., 2010). Being able to prioritise in overload situations is extremely difficult and can result in us going up a number of productivity cul-de-sacs. Having the self-control to close everything down and concentrate on a single task until it is finished is probably the biggest challenge but the key to better productivity.

How do we prefer to communicate at work?

Ultimately, old fashioned face-to-face communication still emerges as essential for building trust, and delivering important or emotionally sensitive messages (Pentland, 2015). But getting people in the same room together can be almost impossible, especially in highly virtualised and globalised businesses. Inevitably, much of business today is conducted over digital communication channels.

Text-based communications – especially chat – tends to be a favourite for pure information exchange (Hickman & Davies, 2018). It is an easy way to get messages to a lot of people with minimal effort. But it’s difficult to convey much in terms of nuance and emotion in text, unless you pepper it with emoticons.

Text-based communications can also create excessive demands on the receivers of them. This is sometimes called “techno-overload” (Tarafdar et al., 2010). As technology makes us more productive and more efficient, things that used to take days now take minutes. This can create a sudden influx of demand on us, can lead managers to communicate more than is necessary (Davis, 2002) and get more information than they can process and use effectively (Fisher & Wesolkowski, 1999). We also tend to become increasingly unable to identify information that is actually useful, rather than spam.

This often results in us getting both tired and stressed, as well as working longer hours. The productivity benefits of agile and flexible working can potentially be displaced by the resulting pressure to keep on top of things. This “techno-invasion” (Tarafdar et al., 2010) can result in people feeling as if they are tethered permanently to work. They may leave the office, but they can’t leave the office behind.

Being “always on” can significantly impinge on family time. The “speed trap” of quick reflex responses has brought pressure to respond immediately. This belief tends to create a false sense of urgency, puts pressure on us to respond fast (with no time to think carefully about our responses) and means that we can spend more time reading and responding to it than actually getting any other work done.

This sense of urgency can have a negative impact on the quality of decision-making (Perlow et al., 2002). Speed and quality are two key variables when people make important decisions, and they often come into conflict. Fast decisions are not always ideal, but more decisions are, of necessity, being made quickly. Faster communication provides more information for decision-makers to use, but their decisions might lack detail or adequate consideration. Combine that with the inevitable shortening of attention spans and we get a shallow, 180-character elevator pitch style of communication. Worse still, key people may not respond in time and decisions are then made without their potentially critical input.

The cost to users is also a factor which needs to be considered. In order to communicate with others in the past there was a cost incurred by both the sender and receiver of information. This was in terms of effort and often financially as well. Today, people can send huge amounts of material to others quickly and with almost zero addit...