Death by 1,000 Messages

DEATH BY 1,000 MESSAGES: THE WORKPLACE TREND DRIVING US TO DISTRACTION

It’s late. Your eyes are heavy. You’re on auto-pilot as you fumble with the keys.

The dull sound of a notification grabs your attention, like it has all day. You take your eyes off the screen and lose concentration.

By the time you look back, you can’t remember where you are, you’re off track and the only option is to crash.

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The extract above hasn’t come from our first ever novella, nor does it describe a tired and distracted driver. The extract is a common scene in the workplaces all over the world and it’s the single greatest source of workplace inefficiency.

Employees are working later because they’re so distracted during the day. They’re frustrated because they’re getting ad-hoc messages and requests even after they’ve left the office and they’re only a moment away from complete shutdown.

Think about it. You’re deep into an important task when a Slack notification grabs your attention or an incoming email chime stops you in your tracks. The important task falls by the wayside as you check the source of the distraction. Whether you respond to the new message, action the request that comes with it or read and move on, you’ve lost valuable time and headspace for the important task.

The extract above provides an analogy to road safety and dramatizes the peril of distraction in a situation we’re all too familiar with. However, not enough of us are attune to the perils of workplace distraction and the consequences of a distracted workforce. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at the negative consequences of messaging apps and debunk the belief that they’re empowering staff to work smarter.

The problem with workplace messaging apps

Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Gmail Chat and Microsoft Teams promise greater workplace communication, collaboration and efficiency. Rather than back and forth emails, the messaging apps prefer quick answers, permanent availability and access to all the information you need.

It sounds great in theory. But the counter-argument and the one being favoured by more and more businesses, is that instant messaging apps are a distraction. They’re causing us to lose focus, get frustrated and lose the ability to switch off.  The latter of which is impacting our mental health. Here’s five reasons why messaging apps don’t work:

Messaging apps are a false dawn. We think we’re being productive by messaging colleagues instantly, constantly. But all we’re actually achieving is replacing email with a more unstructured, messy chat thread. The worst part is now the information isn’t managed on an authorised and compliant application. Your valuable business data is floating around on the internet stored by third-party apps and inaccessible after a period of time. 

In addition, to the messiness, there's also a risk of sending the information to the wrong people and worse losing the information time and time again. 

We haven’t actually improved the quality of outcome or improved productivity by swapping out email for messaging apps. Instant messages are replacing emails but the key information is getting lost. Therefore there's double task handling, over-communication and distraction. 

Workplace messaging tools promised to reduce the time spent in meetings. But that's simply not transpiring. WIPs are still a regular occurrence, decisions are still slow and cumbersome (often requiring a meeting) and the misuse of messaging apps is creating new problems which meetings need to solve. 

Subconsciously, we feel obliged to instantly respond to instant messages, whereas we know there isn’t the same expectation with emails. This leads to short fired replies — without giving too much thought to the outcome, or quality of response. An example of this is when the manager of a remote worker feels the need to communicate to see “how things are going”, wasting both their time and the workers. 

It’s a scientific fact that humans can’t multi-task. We can only do one thing at a time. That’s why PIQNIC only includes messaging in tasks or workflows. It's there to facilitate on-topic communication without the need to breakaway to email or a single purpose chat app. The other advantage is the communication are included in PIQNIC’s information management, so all comms are recorded as part of work, after all, communications are a company’s digital asset. 

It’s time to ban workplace messaging apps

To confirm, we’re not suggesting a ban to business apps with in-built messaging functionality. Collaboration is still an important tool for doing great work. Rather, were suggesting a ban to single-use, messaging-only apps. And specifically, at set times when you need to focus.

Just like drivers are banned from using phones when they drive, we’re proposing a worldwide ban on communication tools during our most important tasks, so that you have complete clarity and the space to do your best work.

While we think most businesses could do with less apps in the workplace, we won’t be upset if you keep your messaging apps. Just set a dedicated time to check and respond to messages. At all other times, shut it down and keep your eyes on the road.

Want to learn more about PIQNIC? Get in touch with our experts right  now.