Checking your emails during a meeting is not necessarily a bad habit

This research work, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports, focuses on what is commonly called “multicommunication”. This term designates the propensity of certain professionals, caught in the flow of notifications, to use several communication tools simultaneously.

You only have to attend any company meeting to realize that most participants are sending emails or messages instead of actively participating in the conversation. The latest annual repository from the Observatory of Infobesity and Digital Collaboration quantifies this phenomenon: working people in France send, on average, 1.1 emails per meeting hour.

This practice is not only observed during meeting times. On a daily basis, employees are regularly interrupted in their missions by a communication request and must “multitasker”. But switching from one task to another, in a very short period of time, is very cognitively demanding. This way of working undermines our attention span and our efficiency, which can become a source of discomfort.

Multicommunicate? Yes, but in moderation

However, a British-Canadian research team says that multicommunication can be good. This can even become an asset if this practice is directly linked to the main task that an employee must accomplish. So, checking social networks during a meeting can be useful if this brief moment of inattention allows you to find ideas that will enrich the discussion.

In other words, multicommunication can be beneficial to those who engage in it if it helps them to have a better understanding of the subject on which they are working, or if it helps to make their exchanges with their peers more relevant. “At first glance, it is easy to give a negative connotation to multicommunication. But we need to focus on how people manage their multicommunication rather than the behavior itself“, says Jinglu Jiang, co-author of the study, in a statement.

To do this, it is important that employees feel free not to be hyperreactive. Some tasks are more complex than others, requiring a higher level of concentration. It can be relatively easy to respond to a text message when you’re sorting your work mailbox, but much less so when you’re leading a meeting.

Jinglu Jiang and his colleagues believe that employers, and more particularly managers, can act to ensure that multicommunication does not become harmful. They can, for example, regulate email flows – especially internally – and subject instant messaging to rules aimed at creating concentration zones. “Good management of this behavior at the individual and collective level makes the difference between multicommunication as a distraction and multicommunication as an asset“, says Jinglu Jiang in the same press release.

Slide: 11 tips for optimizing your teleworking