A speaker argues that workplace distraction—characterized by high expectations with low control—causes anxiety and depression and is a symptom of dysfunctional workplace culture. The talk introduces the concept of an "indistractable workplace," cites research on the "cycle of responsiveness," and uses Slack headquarters as a case study of a company that discourages after-hours messaging.
Chapters
There's a type of work condition that literally causes anxiety and depression disorders. And that type of workplace environment is one where you have high expectations coupled with low control. This has been thoroughly studied. It's called the cycle of responsiveness. You get to work, you look around, you say, oh, my goodness, everybody here is checking their devices all the time. Everybody's responding to email. So that reduces your control, your agency, over your own time. Which means that to get ahead, I also need to constantly be online, which means that I have increased expectations to constantly be connected. Is that distraction in the workplace is a symptom of cultural dysfunction. And it doesn't have to be this way. There are hundreds, and now soon, thousands of companies who are adopting an indistractable workplace. When I was researching my book, I wanted to register a complaint at Slack, the group messaging platform. There's lots of these group messaging tools like WhatsApp. There's all these tools, but Slack is the most popular. And when we did surveys on what's the most distracting technology at work, number one was email. Number two was some kind of group messaging platform like Slack. And so I went to Slack headquarters and I expected to see a bunch of distracted people, that, in fact, if you go to slack headquarters at 6pm the parking lot is empty. And in fact, you will be reprimanded if you use Slack on nights and weekends, because that's not what they do there. In fact, if you go to the company canteen, this is my friend who took a picture. In the Slack headquarters, there's a big sign that says, work hard and go home.
