Wasting brain juice: mental well-being and teleworking

Reading time 12 minutes

Over the past few years, our mental well-being has taken a beating due to the fatigue caused by Zoom and the burnout associated with telecommuting, followed by the numerous adaptations and readjustments brought about by hybrid work policies or the return to the office. Getting back to normal wasn’t quite as straightforward as we’d hoped, as some bad habits crept in.

However, these problems are not the result of any particular event; these changes have simply increased stress levels, revealing the fragility of our well-being at work.

In this article, you’ll discover simple ways to reduce the waste of your brain juice, and how these can contribute to both the productivity and well-being of the members of your organization.

You’ll also see that many Lean principles can be implemented to create workplaces that contribute to our brain’s well-being, and that these principles are easy to integrate into your continuous improvement routines.

Mental well-being: an individual responsibility?

For decades, we’ve known that machines need to be properly maintained to ensure their productivity. Yet we know very little about how to keep our brains in good working order, even though they are now the main working tool for many people.

Most articles and advice state that we are all personally responsible for our mental well-being: resting, adopting a healthy lifestyle, meditating and so on.

That’s not what I want to talk about today. Why not? Because the way workplaces and processes are designed can overload our brains, often with things that are very easy to change.

Mental hygiene is not just an individual responsibility.

Reducing mental workload at work: from task lists to triggers

Let’s think of our brain as a factory:

Memory corresponds to the “inventory surplus” of our mental processes. Long-term memory, on the other hand, is equivalent to “storage”, i.e. “event memory”, and finally, working memory is represented by “current tasks”.

The problem with “working memory” is that it has to be refreshed every 10 to 60 seconds and uses the resources of the fronto-parietal cortex. In other words: it uses the part of your brain that needs the most energy to function, and competes with other tasks such as “problem solving”, “reading comprehension” and “learning”. Every time we use short-term memory to perform a task, we reduce our brain’s capacity to perform the other tasks mentioned above.

If you know anything about production planning, short-term memory is the low-value-added task. It uses up your expensive machine, which is a bottleneck, and limits your overall productivity. If your brain were a factory, you’d do your best to perform this task elsewhere.

To reduce their mental workload, many people make to-do lists. They’re handy, because you can scribble them down on any piece of paper or stage them in a notebook. The advantage of a to-do list is that anything you write down on paper will come out of your mental load and free up space in your brain for value-added thinking.

It’s a very effective strategy for reducing your mental workload, as long as you don’t forget to consult your list!

To make your list even more effective, you can schedule triggers. A trigger is a list containing a schedule and a notification. It can be set up in a calendar application, on a Kanban board or as part of a routine. The secret of a good trigger is to ensure that it contains all the information needed to complete the task.

For example, when setting up an assembly workstation, we put all the required parts within easy reach. The same principle applies to mental work. If you have all the information in one place, then you’re more efficient when it comes to carrying out the task. You can use keywords, e-mail rules, or even labels (to replace the “filing cabinet on the desk” method).

The key is not to have to remember where each piece of the puzzle is. Sorting and filing have not disappeared simply because clutter has become virtual.

Increasing concentration at work: finding the right balance between collaboration time and concentration time

Concentration is another energy-intensive part of the brain. The average adult can concentrate on about seven things at a time. And by things, we mean the most elementary form of information, such as a word, a letter or a number.

Many people believe they can multitask, but in reality they’re simply transferring their concentration from one task to another. Each interruption exhausts our brain. Changing context takes both time and energy. This isn’t a problem when your brain isn’t running at full capacity, but when the workload increases or fatigue starts to build up, our ability to juggle several balls at once diminishes all at once.

The importance of concentration at work

Stress, adapting to change or anxiety will reduce our concentration. Then, each new distraction further reduces our ability to pay attention to what’s important.

People who work from home have told me that their managers expect them to answer their e-mails within 10 minutes. Except that the constant interruption generated by incoming emails, Teams or Slack notifications and all those other annoyances has far more impact on productivity than gossip between colleagues at the corner of the coffee machine.

The sudden arrival of telecommuting, followed by the use of collaborative technologies in hybrid working, has added stress to working life and greatly increased the number of interruptions and task changes in a day. These two factors combine to undermine our ability to concentrate on anything.

In a traditional workplace, if someone has to travel to talk to you, they’ll assess whether what they have to say is worth the effort. They’ll also see if someone is already talking to you, if you’re concentrating on a task, or if you’re in a meeting.

In telecommuting, these efforts and visual cues don’t exist. The amount of information and communication we receive has increased. Not the value.

Notifications, pop-ups and e-mails are like people fighting at your desk to talk to you at the same time. They compete for your limited attention. How many tasks can you accomplish while dozens of people are asking you questions about different subjects at the same time? Can you answer all these questions and get on with your work?

So how can you improve your concentration at work?

Tips for improving concentration in the office and at home

In any workplace, time needs to be set aside for collaborative work, and for work that requires concentration. Thanks to visual cues, this approach can be implemented on an individual basis in the office. There are a number of ways to increase concentration:

• close his office door;
• go into a meeting room;
• wear headphones.

When working remotely, these times need to be stricter. They can be part of a common routine, or the team can agree on signals to show when everyone is available or not.

When I was a manager, I had a routine that allowed me to divide my time between the “Gemba¹ “with my team and office work. This discipline is even more important when working remotely, as it allows the team to plan its time for collaboration and concentration.

The flexibility of remote working can be exploited, as collaboration time is synchronous (everyone has to be available at the same time), while concentration time is asynchronous (it can be done at a time that suits each individual).

Rest and rejuvenation do not mean “doing nothing”.

However, this flexibility comes at a cost. For some people, there are no longer any boundaries between work and rest. A Gallup study showed that people who work remotely put in more hours. This may sound like a good thing for productivity, but we know that “more activity” doesn’t mean “more value”.

Employees who work longer hours can’t rest. Maintaining machines is essential to their productivity, and the same goes for the humans who create value. Keeping people “up and running” is part of the job. In other words, ensuring that human needs are met, whether emotional, spiritual or physical.

Promoting a healthy lifestyle rather than rewarding competition and hours worked helps boost productivity. Rest:

• creativity;
• improve problem-solving skills, and;
• will enhance communications quality.

People who telework are deprived of the social interactions of the office; they need time to experience these interactions elsewhere. It’s a basic human need to connect with others, to exercise or to eat well. The time we no longer spend in transport should be used to meet these needs, not to work more unproductive hours.

And even when team members have everything they need to check a final detail or work an extra half-hour to finish a report, management should have the discipline to refrain from asking for it. Keeping a clear boundary between work and home is even more essential when these two worlds occupy the same space.

This content is available as a mini-training course (1h30).

1. Gemba: this is where the work is done in Lean culture, and comes from the Japanese word for crime scene. ↩︎

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Adapted from an article originally published in The Lean Mag.

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