Working alone could be key to better productivity: Study

In fact, even having an individual working on a different task — within one’s field of vision — is enough to slow down one’s performance, the study says.

“Imagine a situation like a complex assembly line. If you are doing a particular task and the person across from you is doing a different task, you’ll be slowed down regardless of their performance,” said lead researcher Dr Tim Welsh.

According to him, the reason for this is a built-in response-interpretation mechanism that is “hard-wired” into our central nervous systems.

“If we see someone performing a task we automatically imagine ourselves performing that task. This behaviour is part of our mirror neuron system.”

The researchers’ set-up involved an individual performing a simple computer task alone, then with a partner performing a different but related task, and alone again after being told that the partner was going to continue to perform the task in another room.

“When an individual could see their partner actually performing the task, the partner’s performance interfered with their own performance, causing them to perform more slowly.

“When the partner left the room and the individual could only see the results of the partner’s action, the interference effect was no longer observed and performance improved. We believe it’s because the individual no longer represented — or modeled — their partners’ actions, even though they could see the results of these actions,” the study says.

“In a situation where speed and accuracy in performing a certain task are important, I think an argument could be made for a work setting in which people work in isolation — or at least with people who doing very similar tasks.

“That will remove the involuntary modeling of another’s behaviour, potentially improving speed and likely accuracy,” Welsh wrote in the Journal of Human Movement Science.