Fighting for attention in the age of Facebook

Does a great user experience mean a great employee experience?

Capturing your employee’s attention in the digital age can be difficult. There are a plethora of apps, devices and demands on worker time that means getting your workforce to engage with even the best technology and platforms - to help them achieve their professional goals - can be difficult a task. The impulse to reply to emails, react to Slack notifications and respond to social media pop-ups can seem much more pressing than doing an extra bit of e-learning, admin or searching an internal jobs board for an opportunity.

This fight for attention, posits James Williams, author of the prize-winning book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, is exactly what most of us have to contend with all the time.

With the business models of almost all digital applications relying on the capture of our attention - Netflix’s CEO once said their biggest competitor is sleep – what is it that makes an employee more inclined to trawl through Facebook during slow moments at work than engage with an online learning module? There’s clearly a lesson to be learnt from these productivity-sapping ‘distractions’ often viewed as an enemy that must be beaten off or blocked on the office computer.