A Microsoft study identified how often remote workers multitask during a video conference – especially when the group is large and the meeting lasts a long time.
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The etiquette for remote work meetings is weird. You don't have to wear pants, but if your eyes stop looking at the camera during a video call, you may be considered rude, disrespectful, or inattentive. And once you turn off the camera, multitasking can mean hanging out clothes, shopping, or whatever else needs to be done.
If you tend to multitask in video meetings, don’t feel alone—we all do it. A new study by Microsoft employees finds that people multitask more often in longer meetings, and that multitasking occurs much more often in recurring meetings than in a single meeting. Meetings held in the morning have higher rates of multitasking than at other times of the day, and multitasking occurs six times more often in video meetings lasting more than 80 minutes compared to meetings lasting 20 minutes or less.
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Microsoft shared details about what it calls the largest study to date on multitasking and remote workgroups as part of a conference on computer-human interaction. Researchers from Amazon, Microsoft, and University College London examined Outlook email logs and OneDrive cloud for nearly 100,000 Microsoft employees in the U.S. to understand how often people multitask in video meetings and why.
The study suggests that multitasking during virtual meetings is a mechanism to protect people's mental well-being from too many virtual meetings. Lead author and Microsoft Research Fellow Hancheng Cao said the results highlight the need for employers to be more flexible and accommodating about the multitasking of remote employees.
Just because your coworker's eyes are often on the screen doesn't mean they're inattentive, but as virtual meetings proliferate, the study says, "people seem to be left with less time to focus on their work and so they're now in the habit of multitasking to make up for lost time."
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The data was collected between February and May 2020, during the time Microsoft’s workforce was working remotely. Every time someone in a Microsoft Teams video call sent, forwarded, or replied to an email, or edited a file like a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet stored in OneCloud, that action was recorded as multitasking. In 30 percent of meetings, the study found that people were sending emails during video calls.
Source of information: wired.com
