It’s True. Everyone Is Multitasking in Video Meetings

A Microsoft study finds just how often remote workers multitask during videoconferences—especially when the group is large and the meeting runs long.
Illustration of worker on laptop with many arms doing various tasks
Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

The etiquette for remote work meetings is weird. You don’t have to wear pants, but allowing your eyes to dart around your screen can seem rude and disrespectful, a giveaway that you’re distracted by another digital task. And once you turn the camera off, multitasking can mean folding laundry, grocery shopping, or anything else that needs doing.

If you tend to multitask in video meetings, you’re not alone. A new study of Microsoft employees finds that people multitask more frequently in larger and longer meetings, and that multitasking happens far more often in recurring meetings than during ad hoc meetings. Meetings held in the morning have higher rates of multitasking than at other times of day, and multitasking takes place six times as often in video meetings lasting more than 80 minutes compared with meetings that take 20 minutes or less.

Microsoft shared the details of what it calls the largest study to date of multitasking and remote teams this week as part of a human-computer interaction conference. Researchers from Amazon, Microsoft, and University College London examined logs of Outlook email and OneDrive cloud file activity for almost 100,000 US Microsoft employees to get a sense of how often people multitask in video meetings and why.

“There’s an opportunity with remote meetings to just ‘sort-of’ attend a meeting,” says Microsoft chief scientist Jaime Teevan. “You can skip a meeting and watch it at double speed if it was recorded. You can have it playing in the background while you do other things and listen for important points.”

The study shows that multitasking during virtual meetings is a coping mechanism to protect people’s mental well-being from … too many virtual meetings. Lead author and Microsoft Research intern Hancheng Cao said the results illuminate the need for employers to have more flexible attitudes about multitasking for remote teams. Your colleague whose eyes occasionally dart around the screen might not mean to be impolite, but as virtual meetings pile up and drag on, the study says, “people appear to have been left with less time to focus on their work and thus have gotten into the habit of multitasking to catch up.”

The log data was collected between February and May 2020, during which time Microsoft became a fully remote workforce. Each time a person in a Microsoft Teams video call sent, forwarded, or responded to an email or edited a file like a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet saved in OneCloud, that action was logged as multitasking. (A lot of multitasking—like reading emails or scrolling social media—couldn’t be detected with this methodology.) In 30 percent of meetings, the study found, people sent emails.

To get into the specific ways people multitask, study coauthors reviewed diaries or statements written by about 700 Microsoft employees in the US and abroad during approximately the same time period. About 15 percent of diary respondents said they believe multitasking makes them more productive.

Some multitasking, like taking notes or looking at the documents being discussed, helps people stay focused. But the diaries also showed that people exercised, played video games, and watched cat videos. These can be called distractions, but respondents described the activities as ways to cope or their response to a meeting that wasn’t relevant to them.

The diaries also suggested that a lot of people are multitasking to keep up. As one Microsoft employee put it: "It needs to happen, or you can’t get all your work done.” Nearly four in 10 diary respondents said they had to work during meetings to cope with the proliferation of virtual meetings on their schedule as they transitioned to working from home. Coauthors of the study say multitasking to meet productivity demands can lead to mental fatigue and cause people to exhibit disrespectful behavior toward others.

The cognitive load associated with video calls, particularly continual close-distance eye gaze, can bring on what’s come to be known as Zoom fatigue, a phenomenon now common enough that Stanford University researchers are developing a Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale. Cao said some of the people in the study felt offended by colleagues multitasking in meetings because they felt they weren’t paying attention, “but we do observe that after some time, people get used to the pandemic-style remote meeting and more accepting of this behavior—recognizing that there could be all sorts of things going on in a work-from-home environment.”

Another recent large-scale look at how remote teams used video calls in the first months of the pandemic found that working from home during the pandemic meant more meetings and coordination activity and less uninterrupted work time, coaching, networking, and one-on-one meetings with supervisors. The Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago study draws from data collected in March 2020 from about 10,000 workers at an unnamed Asian IT company. That company saw a 30 percent increase in hours worked during the pandemic, but researchers estimate that those same workers had a 20 percent decline in productivity during the same time period. In effect, people—especially parents with kids at home—were less productive, while facing expectations for the same level of productivity as when they worked in the office. That’s created an advantage for people without kids and a disadvantage for others like women, parents with kids at home, and people who were new to the company.

The Chicago researchers used activity tracking tools like Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics to assess things like how much time people spend in meetings and the relationships between people in meetings. The study doesn’t consider multitasking directly, but it does consider distractions and metrics like focus hours, defined as two consecutive hours or more of uninterrupted work. Focus hours for employees declined to 32 hours per week, from 34 hours, after the company went completely remote. By contrast, the time spent in video calls soared to 21 hours a week, from less than one hour; the authors called the volume of video calls a distraction for workers. Time spent on emails also increased two hours a week. Parents generally worked more hours than their colleagues, and junior employees were less productive than senior employees.

Deeper insights into how people collaborate or fail to do so are going to become more important as many people and businesses are considering how to safely return to the office. If the results of this analysis hold true for other businesses, returning to the office may be beneficial to people more likely to experience the downsides to fully remote work. Study coauthor and University of Chicago professor Michael Gibbs said he expects companies will also have to adapt to employees who desire more flexible arrangements that let them work from home a few days a week to avoid long commutes or to be home when their kids get home from school.

But he also said bringing employees back to the office a few days a week is probably necessary for a lot of companies because “I think our research suggests that virtual interactions aren’t a perfect substitute for in-person interactions.” There’s no way to replace spur-of-the-moment talks between colleagues that can be important to innovation, he said, adding, “That kind of productive accident isn't going to happen on Zoom, because everything has to be scheduled on Zoom.” And, as we know, people aren’t always giving Zoom their full attention in the first place.

People had problems with meetings long before Zoom or the pandemic, but the results of these studies seem to indicate that more people should ask themselves whether that video meeting could’ve been an email.


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