For those of you who have developed an expectation that I will post nearly every day, mea culpa. I’m having a very meaningful reflection these days on the nature of managing one’s workload and multitasking. It’s personally relevant, and during my most recent client engagement, multitasking presented itself as the heart of significant organizational discord.
The modern organization - defined as a flat, networked organization - requires a number of skills from workers that were discouraged in the past. Foremost are thinking and solving problems, which were previously considered the domain of management. Though not all organizations have moved to a modern approach to business, surprisingly many have, and still more adopt team-based approaches every day. In organizations that are intent on flattening their hierarchy and expanding the influence of their employees, the workers need to be prepared to participate in problem solving and analysis. Participating in the management of a company is ultimately fun, motivating, and fulfilling, but if someone is unaccustomed to participating in that way it can also be daunting. In my past company, which was a participative management environment, new recruits consistently reported they felt exhausted from their new jobs in a rewarding but entirely unfamiliar way.
Flat, networked organizations also draw upon workers to cut across typical silos of work, engaging with multi-functional teams and learning parts of the organization beyond their traditional role definition. In some cases, the roles have been redefined to encompass more aspects of the corporation. As companies have cut middle-management during their years of cost (versus value) focus - which pretty much defines American business in the 80s and 90s - they discovered the economies of a flat, networked organization. What happened during that time was that lower-management (supervisory level) stepped into former management responsibilities while maintaining their former responsibilities as well. Pushing decision making down to the lowest level at which it can be effectively accomplished gets more difficult as you push deeper into the ranks - not because of lack of ability, but because of a variety of factors that I think include self-concept, old concepts of work responsibility (which have been referred to as clock buster mentality), and experience and familiarity with management practices. So lower-management got squeezed, and multi-tasking became a critical skillset.
On one hand, multi-tasking is powerful. On an organizational level it provides significant cost-savings and risk resistance, because more people know how to do specific jobs. On the individual level it keeps people engaged and interested because there is less chance of boredom.
But any discussion of multi-tasking must include its downside. Eli Goldratt (developer of Theory of Constraints, or TOC) is a strong proponent of flat, networked organizations. But he argues vehemently that multi-tasking is the bane of the modern corporation. TOC is primarily concerned with throughput versus cost focus, and that aspect of his work is widely accepted. But part of his approach to achieving increased throughput is to eliminate multi-tasking to the full extent possible, particularly in project work. His illustration is that if a worker has three one-week-duration tasks to complete, and they focus on all three simultaneously, then the first point at which commercial value can be realized is in three weeks. However, if they focus on one project at a time, there is incremental commercial value at one week, two weeks, and three weeks, which represents financial gain for the organization. Goldratt’s concern is that people have begun to pride themselves on the ability to do many things at once, at the expense of genuine focus and productivity.
I know from personal experience that those who multi-task often see the greatest promotions and rewards in a work environment. So this skill has reached a value status that the pre-modern corporation probably couldn't anticipate. But is it really good? Or is it just a survival skill? In one organization where we were implementing TOC, one of the women in a professional role placed so much of her identity on her ability to multi-task that she refused to see the potential of focusing and getting less things done at once but more things done overall.
The multitasking conflict at my client’s operation wasn’t simple either. Many of their employees were burnt out on multiple work demands, and the fact that they multitasked as much as they did seemed abusive to them. However, there were other people who were proud of their multitasking skills and felt their professional advancement and ability to be competitive (internally) was dependent on placing high value on multitasking as a professional skill. For every argument for multitasking, there is a strong argument against it. I’d love to get some feedback from you to find out where multitasking fits in your professional life and view.
(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill
