During the pandemic, lockdowns and widespread remote working severely tested collective efficiency within organisations. Despite a return to normality, employees are still struggling to work together because they are so dispersed – geographically as well as cognitively.

Indeed, employees often feel overwhelmed at work: two-thirds of working people surveyed for Atlassian’s “The State of Teams 2024” report – involving 5,000 office workers in the US, Australia, India, Germany and France, as well as 100 executives from Fortune 500 companies – complain that their team is constantly being pulled in too many directions.

Constantly juggling multiple tasks is cognitively taxing; science has frequently shown that our brains are not designed to multitask. To maintain the illusion of productivity, employees tend to concentrate on small, quick tasks that don’t require much concentration – such as checking email – rather than on more challenging missions that are often more strategic for the company.

This phenomenon of dispersion is not lost on workers’ superiors: executives estimate that only 24% of their staff carry out tasks that contribute to the company’s performance.

So, how can workers be encouraged to focus more on higher value-added activities? Guidance is one solution – managers can organise regular meetings with their teams to discuss individual objectives and check the status of current projects, for example.

But they should be careful not to overdo it, as scheduling meetings all the time can be extremely time consuming. Office workers spend an average of 14.8 hours a week in meetings, according to Reclaim.ai – a considerable amount of time rarely put to productive use.

The workers surveyed by Atlassian estimate that they spend more time in meetings than at their desks, making progress on the issues raised during those meetings. Firms, therefore, need to clearly define the objectives of team meetings, so staff who take part no longer feel they are wasting their time.

Simultaneously, they need to facilitate internal knowledge sharing. Because, unlike rumours and gossip, information can have a hard time circulating within a company. In fact, more than half (55%) of employees surveyed say they have difficulty finding the information they need to be effective at work.

The proliferation of corporate communication channels (email, SMS, WhatsApp and so on) has a lot to do with this. Artificial intelligence could help remedy this problem, provided workers learn how to use it properly.

At present, however, many employees do not know how to make the most of this technology in their working lives.