In Fribourg, can work be interrupted without scattering attention?
Across Fribourg’s agri-food sector, bilingual industry and university hub, incoming requests can require people to switch tasks before finishing. For SHR — Swiss Human Resources’ “Psychosocial Risks” programme, the management question is specific: how can these transitions be organised without sustaining avoidable fragmentation of attention?
What the literature establishes
Sophie Leroy (2009, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes) shows experimentally that some attention can remain attached to a previous task, particularly when it is unfinished. This “attention residue” can impair performance on the next task. Moving on therefore does not mean being immediately ready to focus on something else.
Anticipating the return affects the transition
Sophie Leroy and Theresa Glomb (2018, Organization Science) show that anticipating time pressure when resuming an interrupted task increases attention residue and impairs performance on the interrupting task. Their experiments indicate that a brief ready-to-resume plan can mitigate these effects. The mechanism therefore concerns the anticipated return as much as the interruption itself.
The hasty conclusion
It would be tempting to conclude that interruptions should be banned or that everyone should concentrate harder. These studies support neither blanket prescription: a safety alert, a production anomaly or an urgent request may require an immediate response. The more useful question is how to distinguish necessary interruptions from those the organisation could defer, then prepare for resumption whenever circumstances permit. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data cannot establish
These studies concern attention and performance; they do not demonstrate that a ready-to-resume plan prevents burnout or mental illness. Their applicability to the constraints of a Fribourg workshop, laboratory or administrative department needs to be tested. Within a prevention strategy, this practice cannot replace an examination of workload or available resources.
A practical check in Fribourg
A team at an agri-food site, a bilingual industrial company or a university department could test a resumption note for non-urgent interruptions over two weeks: stopping point, next action and missing information, in the relevant working language. On resuming, each person simply records whether they had to reconstruct what they needed to do; the indicator is the proportion of resumptions requiring this reconstruction, compared with an initial period of equal length without new instructions. Records remain collective, with no individual ranking, and must never delay a safety intervention. An improvement would suggest a better-organised transition, not a demonstrated reduction in psychosocial risk. To go further: explore the Psychosocial Risks training in Fribourg in the canton of Fribourg, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Psychosocial Risks in Fribourg
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