Today’s Multicommunicating Employees Commonly Have Multiple Conversations At Once

Managers used to want total and undivided attention when communicating with employees. Today’s best managers know that employees are increasingly multicommunicating, rather than having one communication at a time. Multicommunicating means to have multiple overlapping and competing communications at the same time. Employees today may be talking, texting, and emailing, or more, all at once. Today’s goals for productivity and efficiency encourage employees to multicommunicate. Today’s best managers expect employees to multicommunicate, and know that employees may have divided attention and delayed responses during communications. However, managers may want to limit some multicommunications, such as when communicating with customers.

Source: Reinsch, N. L., Jr., Turner, J. W., & Tinsley, C. H. 2008. Multicommunicating: A practice whose time has come? Academy of Management Review, 33, 391-403.