A study on ICT use, interruption management and communication competence in the workplace

Abstract

In a typical office environment, workers are usually exposed to many different ICT tools such as instant messaging, email client, web browser, and telephone just to name a few,

for fostering collaboration as well as to help them increase their work efficiency and

productivity. These workers often have to multi-task across multiple projects and

activities and as a result, task switching and interruptions naturally occur. Despite the

usefulness of using these ICT tools, they also create loads on users in the form of

interruptions such as quantitative and strain demands. Do workers who are more

competent in using computer mediated communications face less interruptions loads?

This research aims to study the relationships between the use of various ICT tools,

interruption management and communication competence and the under lying causes in

the Singapore office of a selected Fo~ne 500 company. Data collection was done in the

form of an online questionnaire with a response of 162 out of 250 invitations in two

rounds. The result indicated some interesting findings such as the younger group being

the more competent users in some of the ICT tools such as Emails and Instant Messaging

as well as having instant messaging as the most popular ICT tool.