Tech workers take to multitasking

9th October 2015

Randstad

Mick Elliott

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Tech workers are among the most confident UK workers in their ability to cope with the demands and pressures of multitasking, according to research from global recruiter Randstad. In a poll of IT professionals, 64% stated they were ‘quite good’ at multitasking and 28% claimed to be ‘very good’. This means, in total, 92% of tech workers see themselves as at least competent at multitasking.

By contrast, only 7% described themselves as below-average multitaskers and a mere 1% claimed to be terrible at it.

The research also found that multitasking is now a valued component in 82% of IT jobs – the highest of any sector. More than two-fifths (42%) of respondents said multitasking was valued a great deal in their job, while almost a third (30%) said it was moderately valued, and 9% said it was over-valued.

However, IT workers pay a particularly high price for the amount of multitasking involved in their work. Randstad’s research showed that workers in this sector experience an 11-minute lag in their normal working efficiency when moving from one task to the next, whereas the UK average was only 6. Although, according to a University of California-Irvine study, all workers suffer more than previously thought. The study concluded that regaining our initial momentum following an interruption takes, on average, more than 20 minutes.

An experiment conducted at the University of London found we lose the equivalent of 10 IQ points when we allow our work to be interrupted by seemingly benign distractions.

However, even among multitasking-savvy IT workers, awareness of this is low. When the poll asked Tech employees whether they felt they paid a cognitive price for multitasking, 52% believed they lost no IQ points whatsoever.

Randstad offers two solutions to the multitasking problem. First, employees who want to avoid maintain focus on a single task can adapt their working environment to move temptation further away – shutting down email accounts, or silencing phones, for example. Second, they can cluster similar activities together, avoiding the dip in productivity which comes with moving to and from very different tasks.

IT workers are more receptive to these strategies than their counterparts in most other sectors. Asked if they ever changed their working environment to cope with multitasking pressures, 47% said yes, the highest of any sector except sales & marketing and 13 percentage points above the all-sector average of 34%.