Where is the best place for knowledge workers to do their jobs? In many cases, it’s not the office—it’s anywhere but.

People who need to do deep thinking to promote their company’s productivity will not find it surprising to discover that constant interruptions and distractions make it nearly impossible to dedicate focus to a task or project. The average worker is distracted six times every hour, according to a report titled “A Crisis Of Attention: Technology, Productivity, and Flow – Using the Science of Knowledge Work to Restore Flow to the Workplace” by David K. Johnson, Josh Bernoff, Christopher Voce, Elizabeth Ryckewaert, Heather Belanger and Thayer Frechette of Forrester. Johnson was recently in Houston to discuss some of the findings of this 18-month study.

Johnson and his colleagues advise corporations on using technology to advance their businesses. He said the people he counsels are already up on technology but aren’t necessarily aware of how their employees use it. “I found I could ask one little question and get silence every time,” he said. “The question is, ‘Tell me about how the people in your company do their best work—what do they need? What conditions are necessary?’ They don’t really know the answer to that.”

The neuroscience of work

Johnson interviewed scores of people for the report, including people who have conducted studies on the science of motivation. He also relied on the work of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in economics in 2002. Kahneman identified two different systems of the brain, one automatic and one cognitive. The automatic system uses very little energy; the cognitive system is quite energy-intensive. It is this system that comes into play when workers are fully concentrating on a project.

“When people are really working in this mode, they require an enormous amount of focus and concentration,” he said. “If I’m interrupting them six times an hour, they’re not getting it done. This is why they go home or go someplace else where they can be unbothered for a little while.”

Another researcher, David Rock, studied the amount of energy available to people at different times in the day. “It turns out we start out with a very small amount of cognitive fuel in the morning,” Johnson said. “How many of you check emails first thing? Bad idea. Really bad idea.”

It’s also not advisable to wait until the end of a full day to start doing strategic planning, he said.

This type of treadmill enables people to get good at “partial attention,” the ability to respond to interruptions and handle mindless tasks. “But we get horrible at being able to do the deep, reflecting planning and knowledge work that we need to do, which is where company value comes from,” he said.

In her book The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile at the Harvard Business School wrote that most corporate leaders think that financial incentives are the major motivation for their employees. But her research indicates that the ability to make progress is actually a greater motivation than money. Being able to find the uninterrupted time to make that progress enables employees to attain “cognitive flow,” where they become so wrapped up in what they’re doing that they can spend several hours doing it, forgetting meals and even quitting time in the process.

The researcher who coined this term is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who discovered that people who can reach flow on a regular basis are 127% more productive than their average coworkers. The top 1% of people who can reach flow is 47 times more productive than the bottom 1%.

Johnson said there is a correlation between employee satisfaction and customer experience, and companies that rate high on the customer experience index are outperforming the S&P 500 by 200%.

“It’s no longer a touchy-feely thing,” he said. “These links are significant.”

Entering a virtual environment

Mastering cognitive flow is only half the battle, though. Employees also need technology to help them do their jobs. Johnson did a workshop with an electronics company in which members of its design group were given a simulated project to begin a product line. They had to develop the marketing, the engineering, etc.

“We watched over their shoulders as they tried desperately to get access to information to find out who in the organization knew these things,” he said. “At the end of the day, they were frustrated. They had maybe 10% of what they needed, and they couldn’t proceed.”

A lack of resources pushes motivated employees to buy their own personal devices and applications, and many of them also will work on their own time to develop algorithms and software that aren’t made available to them within the company, he said.

The concept of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is becoming a reality in the oil and gas industry. At its basic level it enables employees to access data remotely, but Johnson emphasized that picking the right technology for the use case is important, and navigating the complex landscape of available technologies is critical. For instance, a field engineer using an iPad has different technology needs than an engineer who is doing high-end design work, Johnson said.

“You may find that VDI is not great for a mobile knowledge worker except maybe as a secondary desktop device,” he said. “But if they’re going to do heavy engineering, they’re going to need to be on a high-speed network. You have to look very carefully at the laws of physics and the characteristics of the technology before applying it.”

The addition of graphics processing units to VDI systems is now enabling larger datasets to be moved and rendered without loss of latency, he said. This is critical for visualization work. New storage and network solutions are enabling companies to remove latency and improve the performance of the entire system. And increasingly, hardware companies are developing converged infrastructures for VDI in which all of the components have been matched and the latency removed, he said. This in turn is enabling cross-discipline collaboration and faster, more accurate decision-making.

For instance, NetApp and Cisco offer their FlexPod Datacenter with NVIDIA GRID and Citrix XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro technology to provide secure and remote access to dispersed cross-disciplinary teams. Important datasets can be centralized into a few locations, and visualization capabilities are available where needed. This enables near real-time decision making, removes bottlenecks and reduces nonproductive time.

Overall, Johnson said, companies will benefit from investing in the right types of technology to enable their skilled resources to do their jobs better. “They’re going to start thinking a lot more about the information resources people need, that knowledge workers need to do their jobs, and investing and making those things readily available to speed up the knowledge work,” he said. “Companies need to start dropping barriers.”

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