JALA Thoughts

I am often asked why I make claims about the ability of telework to improve teleworkers’ effectiveness; whether there is some sort of magic that makes telework special. Well, telework may be special in its ability to increase effectiveness but it’s not magic. Here’s part of the secret formula.

QUIET!

That’s it. A substantial portion of the documented improvement in the effectiveness of teleworkers derives from the fact that they are interrupted less often than their in-office colleagues. The get more time to think about what they’re doing. Now there is an article in the October 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum that quantifies the impacts of interruptions on effectiveness. Here’s an example from the article Infoglut by Nathan Zeldes:

Field research by Gloria Mark and her colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, shows that information workers are interrupted, on average, every three minutes. Even if it only takes the brain a minute to get back in gear that’s a lot of wasted time.

“Interruptions” in this research included phone calls; incoming emails; colleagues socializing; Internet surfing; texting and similar deviations from the business at hand.

Routinely during our training sessions for teleworkers I would ask them how often they were interrupted when they were working in the office. Most answers were less than ten minute intervals. Mark’s research suggests that those interruptions were more frequent than the answers I’ve received. Next I would say, “Suppose that you have just thought of the breakthrough idea that would revolutionize your company’s business and you were interrupted; how soon could you recover that flash of inspiration after the interruption was over?” Often the answer was: “Never”.

Here’s the rest of that secret: Properly trained teleworkers experience significantly fewer interruptions than do their colleagues back in the office. Let’s do the numbers.

The Mark research suggests that information workers are interrupted every three minutes. For the sake of argument let’s say that each interruption takes one minute. So we have three minutes of uninterrupted time plus a one minute interruption plus another minute to get back to pre-interruption status, for five minutes in all, on average. So two of every five minutes—forty percent of the time, on average, is wasted each and every day in the office. Given a nominal eight hour day that’s three hours and twelve minutes down the tubes.

Now let’s take the average well-trained home-based teleworker. By well-trained I mean that he/she has established rules that the kids are not to interrupt except in emergencies; housework is to be done outside business hours; watching TV is similarly excluded;  etc. Let’s say that, even so, the teleworker is somehow interrupted every eight minutes, on average. Given that same one minute for the interruption and one minute to recover then the teleworker only loses twenty percent of the day and has 6.4 hours of daily effective work versus 4.8 hours for his/her in-office colleagues—a one-third improvement in effectiveness, never mind the leap in effectiveness if that revolutionary idea is saved.

Try this with your own case or your own organization. Just keep a daily log of interruptions and related down time for a week. Then try it when you’re working at home. You may be amazed at the difference.