Hello everyone! This is Hancheng from Stanford University.
Today I'm happy to share with you our work:
large-scale analysis of multi-tasking behavior during remote meetings.
Finding it hard to stay focused during meetings and try to get other things done?
You are not alone!
Our paper is motivated by our daily experience during COVID.
As demonstrated by prior literature, remote work is an essential mode of work across industries.
Central to remote work are remote meetings through video conferencing tools
such as zoom, which help remote team members stay connected,
collaborate and function as an organization despite physical distance.
Many of us have experienced a lot of remote meetings during COVID.
Nevertheless, prior work on remote meeting are limited in coverage and mostly qualitative.
What COVID makes possible,
is a unique research opportunity for us to study remote meeting at scale.
Here we focus on multitasking behavior within remote meetings.
Multitasking behavior refers to the action of performing more
than one task in parallel or in rapid succession.
Multitasking has been shown to closely relate to one's productivity and well-being.
Remote meeting multitasking is ubiquitous yet there is a lack of an understanding when
how and why people engage in multitasking behavior on the remote meetings
Here we contribute to the literature by introducing a large-scale mixed
methods analysis of multitasking behavior during remote meetings.
More specifically, our research paper seeks to address the following four research questions.
First of all, how much multitasking is happening during remote meetings?
Secondly, what factors are associated with multitasking during remote meetings?
Thirdly, what do people do when multitasking during remote meetings?
And lastly, what are the consequences of multitasking during remote meetings?
We introduced a mixed methods approach, including a regression analysis on telemetry data
and a diary study, to ensure the objectivity, generalizability, and the depth of our analysis.
Let's first talk about the regression analysis. For the data set,
we are using meeting related action, email usage data, and file edit data from Microsoft products,
covering four separate week long snapshots, from February to May 2020 of Microsoft employees in US.
We derive meeting duration, meeting size, meeting types,
hour of the day, and day of the week as meeting characteristics from the telemetry data,
and we discretized meeting characteristics to facilitate regression.
After joining three data sources for each 'meeting user' pair,
we label it as email multitasking if the user was found to have at least one active
email action during the meeting, otherwise the non-multitasking label was assigned.
File multitasking was labeled in a similar way after doing that.
We ran a conditional logistic regression
to understand the relationships between multitasking and meeting characteristics.
We also ran a diary study between mid-April and mid-August 2020 with the
survey question "what have you noticed about multitasking in your recent online meetings".
Through our analysis we find that around 30 percent of remote meetings involve
email multitasking while around 25 percent of meetings involve file multitasking.
We find that more multitasking may be a possible result of work rhythm adaptation,
and the ease of turning off video and audio may encourage more multitasking.
We further demonstrate that intrinsic meeting characteristics associated with multitasking.
For example, more multitasking happen in large,
long, morning and recurring meetings as well as meetings with lower relevance.
Extrinsic meeting characteristics are associated with multitasking as well. People multitask during
meetings to catch up on their work, due to external distractions, or for anxiety relief.
We further show what people are doing when multitasking.
Finally we demonstrate the positive and negative side of multitasking,
including helping boost productivity, loss of attention, fatigue, and sense of disrespect.
As a large scale and systematic analysis of remote meeting multitasking behavior,
our work points to several important best practice
guidelines for remote meetings as well as some important design implications for practitioners.
Thank you so much for your interest in our work! Feel free to reach out
to us if you have any questions or comments.