From emails to instant messaging, today’s workers have a multitude of tools at their disposal for communicating within the workplace. While experts have previously been concerned that this wide array of communication channels can negatively impact employees’ health and the quality of their work, new British-Canadian research suggests otherwise.

This research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports, looks at what is commonly known as “multicommunication”. This refers to the propensity of certain professionals who, caught up in the flow of notifications, use several communication tools simultaneously.

Sit in on almost any company meeting and you’ll soon realise that most participants are reading or sending emails or messages, rather than playing an active part in the discussion. In fact, this practice is not confined to meetings: on a day-to-day basis, employees are regularly interrupted in their tasks by communications-based demands, and have to multitask.

But switching from one task to another in a very short space of time is cognitively demanding. This way of working undermines our attention span and our efficiency, which can become a source of frustration.

Now, this research team claims that multicommunication can be a good thing – even an asset, if it is directly linked to the main task an employee has to perform. Checking social networks during a meeting, for example, can be useful if this brief moment of inattention leads to ideas that will enrich the discussion.

Multicommunication can be beneficial to the person who indulges in it, if it helps them gain a better understanding of the subject on which they are working, or if it contributes to making their discussions with their peers more meaningful.

“On the surface, it’s easy to place a negative connotation on multicommunicating. But we need to focus on how people manage their multicommunicating rather than the behaviour itself,” study co-author Jinglu Jiang noted.

To achieve this, it’s important for employees to feel they don’t have to be hyper-reactive. Some tasks are more complex than others, requiring a higher level of concentration. It may be relatively easy to reply to a text message when you’re sorting through your email inbox, for instance, but much less so when you’re chairing a meeting.

Jiang and colleagues believe that employers, and more specifically managers, can take action to ensure that multicommunication does not become detrimental. They can, for example, regulate the flow of emails – especially in-house – and subject instant messaging to rules designed to ensure sufficient moments of concentration with minimal distraction.

“Properly managing this behaviour at the individual and team levels makes the difference between multicommunication as a distraction and as an asset,” Jiang concluded.