Brains Back to Work

Brains Back to Work

NOTE: While this transcript has been reviewed, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
So I'm here with the team leader in this company's supply chain operations. How you doing?

Team Leader:
Doing just about okay. Thanks.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
Tell me the issue you're having.

Team Leader:
Oh, you'll see.

Employee #1:
Oh, hi. I've got everyone patched in.

Employee #2:
Hi.

Employee #1:
Hi there.

Team Leader:
Hi all. So how's the project from our latest meeting coming?

Employee #1:
What project?

Team Leader:
The one we talked about for three hours yesterday.

Employee #2:
I don't think we've gotten very far. We really don't understand it.

Team Leader:
What don't you understand?

Employee #2:
Well, actually, I wasn't tuned in enough to what you need.

Team Leader:
Nevermind. I'll call you back.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
So you just explained that project about 12 hours ago and it seems like nobody can recall it.

Team Leader:
That's right. They have too many distractions, emails, texts, apps, new big headlines every hour. So they just weren't paying attention.

[THEME MUSIC]

Jill Wiltfong:
Hi, this is Jill Wiltfong, Chief Marketing Officer at Korn Ferry, and this is Briefings, our deep dive into the world of leadership. Today's topic, the attention crisis in the workplace. The latest science says people's ability to think continuously on one topic, in other words, pay attention, has fallen sharply, almost 75%. And as we can tell from our hypothetical conversation, that's a very real threat to day-to-day operations. And it's also potentially bad news or plain old ingenuity and innovations that come from the deep thinking that companies these days really rely on. But are there ways to help people put their brains back to work? With me today is Amelia Haynes. She specializes in neuroscience research at the Korn Ferry Institute. Hi Amelia.

Amelia Haynes:
Hi Jill. I'm glad to be on the show.

Jill Wiltfong:
Now, Amelia, I promised to pay very close attention to your answers. Let's start with the numbers though. Apparently the University of California at Irvine has been tracking worker attention spans as far as 2004. Back then, workers went two and a half minutes before switching tasks in 2013, 9 years later, guess how long they lasted?

Amelia Haynes:
I don't know, maybe a minute and a half?

Jill Wiltfong:
That's pretty close. It was 75 seconds and today we're told it's just 47 seconds, so less than a minute, which is unbelievable. Are you surprised behind this or not so surprised?

Amelia Haynes:
It's certainly a surprise and a concern that the Irvine study is coming out with numbers like that. On the other hand, it's hard to be entirely surprised by those kinds of stats given that look around, we are constantly inundated by so much information that our brains have to process at any given moment.

Jill Wiltfong:
As a leader in an organization, why is this important news and something to really consider?

Amelia Haynes:
Let's take a step back from leadership just for a quick second. When we're distracted, we're also far more likely to make mistakes or miss things altogether, and it has social impacts too. If you're in a conversation with someone who seems like they're not paying attention, it can be kind of offensive and it can be off-putting. So it seems like distraction at the worst case scenario could potentially cause you to miss out on opportunities or deals. And when you look at the whole picture together between the time and the mistakes and potentially missing things and missed deals, distraction can look really, really costly.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
Did you ever have an experience where you're talking to an employee and it's like, hang on, I just told you this yesterday, or at least I told you this at least three times?

Marcos Clowes:
Yes. You're using an example that you just said that where this information's being communicated yesterday and then we're having problems whereby the agent hasn't heard the change has taken place and therefore completes the customs clearance under the old regulations as opposed to under the new ones.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
And the agent didn't understand the process because they were just distracted. They just weren't paying-

Marcos Clowes:
Yes, without our agents having an accurate understanding of what's required, we don't have a product to sell to our customers because it's experience and expertise that we sell.

Jill Wiltfong:
I find it really interesting to think about how switching our focus to an email, to Instagram, to LinkedIn, all of those little switches can actually slow us down so much. You've talked a little bit about this analogy between the brain and a muscle, and I love this analogy. Talk a little bit about this and this connection here.

Amelia Haynes:
You may have heard the expression, things that fire together wire together. If you're not familiar, put simply when we perform a specific mental action, and this is anything from remembering somebody's name to practicing a skill or bringing your attention back to something, the stronger the connections between those synapses becomes. It's a process called myelination. It's essentially like greasing the wheels so you can get from one thing to another more easily and more quickly. So the more you do something like that, the more reps you do, the stronger those connections become and the easier it is for them to fire together. But if you consider it like a crunch, if you do one a day, you're probably not going to get a six-pack.

Johann Hari:
We're in real trouble. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for only three minutes. For every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when I was seven years old, there's now a hundred children who've been identified with those problems. So I was really conscious, something bad is happening to us. You've got to understand one thing about the human brain more than anything else. You can only consciously think about one or two things at a time. That's it. This is just a fundamental limitation of the human brain. The human brain is not changed significantly in 40,000 years. It ain't going to change on any timescale that any of us are going to see.

Jill Wiltfong:
That's journalist and stolen focus author Johann Hari speaking about why we can't focus on things as well as we used to. But as we look deeper into this problem, the more attention we pay to it, we find there may be some ways companies can help, more on that to come.

[THEME MUSIC]

Jill Wiltfong:
So we're back with Amelia Haynes, Neuroscience Pro for Korn Ferry Institute, and we're focusing on why workers can't focus. I'm sure you have looked into this, how much working remotely has contributed to this. There are lots of distractions at home. It's got to be playing a factor in there. I've got kids, I've got a dog running around here. People have all sorts of things happening in their environment. Is that exacerbating this issue?

Amelia Haynes:
Distractions exist all over the place. I remember when I was in college, I had friends that would go study in a coffee shop, which is loaded with auditory and visual and social distractions. But for them, those things were less distracting than the alert of their bed or TV or phone or a quick nap here and there. Other people, like me, did better working from their dorms when there were fewer distractions or where I felt like I had more control over the distractions in my environment, there was less noise, there was no other people.

So I don't know how well really a one size fits all model or if there's a totally perfect solution. I think it takes mental discipline. There's a really important case to be made for taking mental breaks, and this is different from unconscious distraction. Mental breaks are intentional, deliberate, and intermittent breaks where we let our minds rest from highly directive and goal-oriented attention. And the reason I bring this up is because neuroscience shows us that when we relax that effort, again intentionally and intermittently, we engage in another part of our brain called the default mode network, which is actually really important for things like creativity and innovation.

Brynn Winegard:
In the Industrial Revolution in the 1870s, most of the factories were predicated on the idea that workers were basically like machines, and that breaks or taking breaks was really just a waste of time. No productivity happened, nothing got done. And so breaks are a real decrement to productivity. Here's what we know is that all of the research shows that from a brain-based perspective, you need breaks. In fact, you are not a machine. You're nothing like it. You need more breaks, not less. What this means is you should be organizing your day, not like a marathon, but like a series of sprints. So plan your work in 45 minute increments with a 15 to 20 minute break in there, and then your brain will be that much easier to reset, restart, and be productive again.

Jill Wiltfong:
Let's drill down a little bit deeper here on the impact on business. I think that's what a lot of us are here to listen and learn about. Do you think the iPhone, for an example, could have actually even been invented if Steve Jobs were constantly watching Instagram?

Amelia Haynes:
My guess is if he were constantly watching Instagram, it might've been a little bit more difficult. But I think that it's important to recognize that innovation and creativity have a lot of different sources. My colleague, Dr. Rangan Ferra does a lot of work on creativity. That's super interesting. And one of the things that she talks about is how some of our best ideas and our most innovative ideas, like we talked about, don't come from when we hunker down and focus really hard on something. They come from those other moments, those in-between moments when we kind of get out of our own way and let our brains continue to do the work,

Chris Bailey:
There's even a mechanism in our mind called the novelty bias by which our mind rewards us with a hit of dopamine. We get that same stimulation when we check Facebook. Our mind rewards us for seeking out and finding distraction. There's a great quote that I love that you might be familiar with from J.R.R. Tolkien where he says that not all those who wander are lost, and the exact same thing is true with regard to our attention. If you think back to when your best, most brilliant ideas strike you, you're rarely focused on something. Maybe this morning you were taking a shower and then your mind had a chance to connect several of the constellations of ideas that were swirling around in your mind to create an idea that would never have materialized otherwise if you were focused on something else, on your phone, for example.

Jill Wiltfong:
That's Chris Bailey, author of Hyperfocus on how technology is chemically driving our brains to distraction. So how can you take this on more globally as a leader and coax people into thinking more deeply? Is a four-day work week an answer? Is having those no meeting days an answer?

Amelia Haynes:
Both of those that you've mentioned so far can serve the purpose of giving the brain a break if people use them that way. The responsibility is a shared one, I think. If you implement a four-day work week and everyone spends the fifth day on their phones, scrolling mindlessly, watching TV, answering intermittent texts, I'm not sure how much that will help the problem. But if you're able to give people their time back in any sort of capacity that allows them and encourages them to read a book, to have new ideas, to move their bodies, to get a really good night of sleep, to nourish themselves and rest, I think that could be hugely impactful.

Jill Wiltfong:
So Amelia, hopefully I did okay. Didn't get too distracted. Hopefully I get some little points for paying attention this whole time.

Amelia Haynes:
Well, I would be delighted to know that I was interesting enough to keep your attention for far longer than 47 seconds.

Jill Wiltfong:
I am sorry. What was that? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It's all good. Thank you so much for being here. Really, really appreciate your time.

Amelia Haynes:
My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

[THEME MUSIC]

Rupak Bhattacharya:
Hi, I am Rupak Bhattacharya. Thanks for watching and listening. Here's what else is happening in the world of business from Korn Ferry's this week in leadership.

J.R. Whalen:
The good news is they're not laying off employees, but the bad news is they're offering workers a chance to stay, but reassigning them to less than ideal positions.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
Is reassignment the new layoff? Mentions of reassignment or similar terms during company earnings calls more than tripled over the last year. Experts say it's a bid to retain top talent for the long haul.

Archival:
Humankind now finds itself in the age of the solo problem solver, the lone achiever.

Rupak Bhattacharya:
More than a third of Gen Z workers say they don't enjoy working in a team setting and nearly half claim to work better alone, according to a survey. What's more, six in 10 professionals say the biggest influence of Gen Z on the workforce is a decrease in collaboration.

Irene Chang Britt:
Very often, all of the members of the board are good contributing members, but if you have to make room, you have to figure out how do you turn over?

Rupak Bhattacharya:
A survey this year says, nine out of 10 C-suite executives believe at least one director on their board should be replaced. And 66% of those executives cite the reluctance of directors to retire as the biggest obstacle to diversity efforts. For more insights on business and leadership, head to kornferry.com/insights.

Jill Wiltfong:
The Executive Producer of Briefings is Jonathan Dahl. Today's episode was produced by Rupak Bhattacharya, Chelsea Starks, Nadira Putri and Teresa Allan, and edited by Jaron Henrie-McCrea. It contains reporting by Russell Pearlman, Arianne Cohen, and Peter Lauria. Our video segment contains original artwork by Frazer Milton, Hayley Kennell, Jonathan Pink and Sasha Kostyuk. Don't forget to read our magazine available at newsstands and at kornferry.com/briefings. That's it for Korn Ferry's Briefings. I'm Jill Wiltfong, we'll see you next time.