Driven to Distraction: The Curse of Meetings and Smartphones

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Hi, welcome to Working It, and thanks for the emails, podcast guest tips, and smart workplace tips you send me. Be sure to send them and share this email with colleagues and friends.

📚 After last week’s photo of my wobbly tower of unread business books, I had a lot of suggestions on where to start. My favorite was from Mingqi Yin, a student at London Business School, who emailed from within Professor Alex Edmans’ class to recommend his book. grow the cakea blueprint for reforming business in a socially responsible way (and the election of my colleague Andrew Hill as best business book of 2020).

Mingqi, I hope Professor E gives you an A. I moved grow the cake to the top of the stack and report back.

Read on for my exasperated take on why we need to learn some discipline and focus before implementing AI at work, and at Office Therapy I advise a reader dealing with an email catastrophe.

Get in Touch: Submit book recommendations and ideas for Working It podcasts and newsletters to isabel.berwick@ft.com. Or you can private message me confidentially on LinkedIn.

Can we fix our time-wasting work habits? 📱💻

Suddenly, it seems to me that everyone wants to talk about the transformative potential of artificial intelligence at work. Slowing down for a hot minute, and this makes me feel like the designated driver at a wild party, makes me wonder if there are basic things leaders and managers need to fix. before we jumped into the arms of AI. Are we, in other words, trying to level up too fast?

It was precisely this “back to basics” angle that emerged when I spoke to experts last week on a panel provocatively titled: “Psychology or Technology: What Can You Do More to Improve Productivity?”

We were so productive on the day that we presented the panel twice, at a conference in London for hiring managers, organized by MindGym.

Experts on stage included Lucy Cooper, Microsoft’s director of customer innovation. She summarized some findings from the tech giant’s new survey, Will AI Fix work? It was based on the opinions of 31,000 workers from around the world.

When asked “what’s stopping you from being more productive right now?” respondents mentioned meetings. Both inefficient meetings (number one productivity blocker) and “too many meetings” (number three).

It seems that other people prevent us from being more effective and leave us “uninspired” (number four). The next slide captures it.

If we can fix a time-wasting meeting culture, we’ll have a better idea of ​​what baseline efficiency might look like. And it would be a good idea to do this before starting any massive AI-powered organizational change program that will make employees a) fearful and b) possibly out of a job. (Or up to half a job, depending on to investigate in Marchthough at the current speeds of generative hype, things have likely moved on since then.)

Although Microsoft respondents did not rank “looking at my smartphone” as one of the top five reasons for being inefficient, another panelist, Tomás Chamorro-Premuzic*, author of I Human: AI, automation and the search to recover what makes us unique, told us how pervasive digital distractions are as a barrier to good work: “Between 60 and 85 percent of smartphone use happens during work hours, whether people are at home or in the office , It doesn’t matter”. Tomas cited research indicating that the cost to the US of this distraction is $650 billion a year. “Higher than the cost of absenteeism or illness.”

85%

Up to 85% of all smartphone usage is during work hours

Multitasking also takes a hit. “Usually, it results in detrimental performance. . . equivalent to 10 IQ points lost, which is about the same as smoking cannabis, and presumably less pleasurable.” 🍃🍃

I’m not sure what would stop us from looking at our smartphones, unless phones are banned in offices (maybe we could learn something from schools banning phones in class).

I’d love to hear your ideas on how to improve basic workplace efficiency. Hit reply to this email (no focus required).

*Side note: I was intrigued to meet Tomas as he is famous on the FT – a 2019 interview with him, conducted by my colleague Emma Jacobs, caused a sensation and went viral. The title of it may have had something to do with it: Why do so many incompetent men earn at work? 👀

office therapy

The problem: A colleague emailed a client but didn’t realize he had a whole chain under it, including me and him badmouthing said client for being so picky. There was also a comment, not mine, but I sent a laugh/cry emoji in response, about how abrasive the client team lead is. Said team leader has complained to my manager. My manager isn’t making it a disciplinary offense, but I’m mortified. What do I do now?

isabella says: You are not alone. We’ve all been there, either as the sender or recipient of a misdirected email, and it can have serious consequences. A friend who got a big internal promotion was accidentally copied into an email chain containing an angry message to the boss of a colleague who didn’t get the job, questioning my friend’s competence (what confidence in defeat!). This triggered a depression in my friend that lasted for many months. It was terrifying to witness.

Fortunately, your email mishap will pass. A classy apology is never wasted. Ask your own boss how to handle it; you may want to test the waters with the client. If you get kicked out of the project, that might even be a blessing.

Picking up the phone to say sorry can be scary, but it could work wonders. Or ask to see the Boss Client in person. Take chocolate.

To avoid this in the future, activate the “undo send” function (it is in the general settings of Gmail). You can retrieve an email for 30 seconds after sending it. My other tactic is to write the email first, check it, then send it last. That one I learned the hard way, after an email mistakenly sent to the CEO of Pearson, then the parent company of FT. Pearson’s catchphrase at the time was “always learning”. I certainly did.

Do you have a question, problem or dilemma for Office Therapy? Do you think you have better advice for our reader? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com. We anonymize everything. His boss, colleague or his subordinates will never know.

This week on the Working It podcast

The office has an image problem and the mandates to return to the office are being ignored. Why are people so resistant to going back to the office? And are we actually sabotaging ourselves by sitting at home for so long? Humans need contact and connection; it is good for our work and for our mental health.

On this week’s podcast I speak with NYU Business School Professor Scott Galloway (and host of Professor G Pod) on why he thinks more office time is good for us, and especially for young people, and my FT colleague Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who recently wrote about CEOs (somewhat cynical) address the problem of loneliness in the United States.

Five outstanding stories from the world of work

1. Let’s not write people off as ‘AI losers’: Sarah O’Connor rejects the idea that AI will create winners and losers at work and that losers should be compensated. She uses the example of a Swedish scheme that encourages lifelong learning by allowing time off to train in something new while being paid 80 per cent of normal salary.

2. How cybersecurity broke into the boardroom: CEOs are increasingly realizing the scope of the threat of cyber breaches and educating themselves about the risks. Andrew Hill talks to experts on ways organizations can protect themselves, and to CEOs who have been hacked.

3. Working from home risks slowing down the London economy: Office attendance in the UK capital has stalled at 60 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report from the Center for Cities. The urban policy think tank suggests that fewer in-person workplace interactions will have a negative effect on productivity.

4. Having the conversation about mental health at work: It can be difficult to raise difficult topics with staff, but Ben Parr speaks to organizations with best practice examples, which can be as simple as regular meetings where the manager is ready to listen and not judge.

5. Life in the age of layoffs: Pilita Clark delves into the aftermath of losing her job and discovers that unexpected changes or layoffs may not be a disaster, a good reminder that careers are not linear.

One more thing: A recommendation for beautiful little things on Disney Plus (Hulu in the US). It’s not strictly a working series, but it follows a middle-aged woman whose promising writing career was derailed by grief and motherhood. She gets a new job as a dying aunt, and little things start to change and work themselves out. It is a dramatization of the book of the same name by Cheryl Strayed, starring Kathryn Hahn. It’s also grimly funny (in my opinion, some reviewers disagree).

And finally . . . help the FT with our new recruitment industry ranking 👋

The FT is launching a new rankings project to help companies identify the best recruiting pools in their sectors. My colleagues in the project publishing department would like to hear from you:

*If you are a member of a HR department at a UK-based employer, or are a manager responsible for recruiting

*If you work for a recruiting or executive search firm

*If you have been in contact with a recruiter as a candidate

Please click here to sign up for our survey.

Our final ranking will be published in November. Thank you!