Are you overloading your mind?
By Inês Machado
In an era where mental health is increasingly claiming space in our daily lives, it is essential to bring this concern to our workplace as well. If vigorous mental health brings more productivity to the performance of a professional activity, a Cognitive Load adjusted to the capacity of each one will also produce similar effects. But to what extent are we considering the influence of each individual’s Cognitive Load on the performance of their work? And what is the impact of this type of load on each individual’s mental health?
Context
Cognitive Load theory was first developed by educational psychologist John Sweller in the late 1980s while analysing how his students studied and solved problems. Sweller realised that to solve problems, his students needed to have high cognitive thinking skills. From then on, Sweller dedicated himself to understanding how to reduce this cognitive load to help his students. Cognitive Load theory was John Sweller’s way of quantifying this effort. He defines Cognitive Load as “the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory.”
Working memory has a limited capacity, and it is important to keep it manageable. Cognitive Load theory refers to the amount of information that working memory can hold simultaneously. Sweller distinguished three cognitive load types: intrinsic, extraneous, and germane.
- Intrinsic load refers to the complexity and difficulty associated with a specific task or new information;
- Extraneous load is a type of load created by the way information is presented to the person, particularly related to the environment where tasks are performed;
- Finally, germane load refers to the degree of difficulty in being able to link current knowledge to additional information and the work that is put into the lasting storage of knowledge.
Cognitive Load and the Workplace
In FARFETCH’s large ecosystem, applying and taking care of the cognitive load of the various teams brings excellent benefits that are only sometimes adequately considered. Ignoring this load inherent to each employee may overload the human mind, which, as mentioned above, has a limited capacity. In addition to the physical and mental effects the person feels, this overload will have repercussions on the work and responsibilities assigned to him, such as successive delays in delivering new tasks, quality problems and, repeatedly, a decrease in motivation.
With the awareness of the dangers that an overloaded mind and a too-high cognitive load can have on its employees’ health, the Live Engineering area management was concerned with understanding how the cluster would be dealing with the difficulty and effort inherent in the execution of their tasks. Since its foundation, FARFETCH has been governed by several values that have guided the company as it expanded and became the “global platform for luxury fashion”. One of these values is precisely “todos juntos”, which reinforces the company’s effort to prioritise the well-being of all its employees.
The Live Engineering area, in line with the company’s conduct, wanted to ensure the well-being of all the teams in the area. Therefore, a survey was implemented that sought precisely to understand and quantify the cognitive load of all workers in this cluster. Being aware of the cognitive load of people in each area allows us not only to contribute to the well-being of each individual but also allows us, in a broader sense, to work on building a progressively more pleasant work environment and more adjusted to the needs of each one, also proving to be a fundamental point in retaining talent.
Construction and Application of the CL Survey
The survey, designed to assess the cognitive load of Live Engineering teams, was built on the theory established primarily by Professor John Sweller. The survey was divided into three parts, each dedicated to each of the three types of cognitive load. The first part focused on intrinsic load. In this section, questions were designed to understand the degree of difficulty associated with the tasks performed by the respondent. The section included questions such as rating the functions’ complexity, the amount of critical information needed to complete the job, and the demanding decisions at work. The second section was dedicated to extraneous load, more precisely, the type of load caused by how information is presented to the person.
Questions were asked such as the level of concentration needed to carry out the work, the amount of obsolete data, the amount of information the person considered to be lacking to carry out their duties, the mental effort required, the average number of meetings the person has per day, the relevance of these meetings and their influence on the respondent’s performance. Finally, the third and last section concerned germane load, more precisely, the effort required to build lasting knowledge and schemas. Here, questions were asked about the importance of theoretical knowledge in the execution of their practical tasks, as well as about the person’s perception of their current workload and whether this workload impacts their physical or mental health or both.
The survey was administered using Google Forms and had a total of 2 weeks of implementation, was filled in anonymously and had only one initial filter question about which of the three Live Engineering teams the respondents belonged to. This question was purposely asked because it was decided early that it would be advantageous to have the respondents’ answers organised by team, as the three teams have quite different scopes between them. The workload of each respondent can vary depending on their team.
After the implementation of the survey, the structuring of the results obtained followed. For this structuring, a dashboard was built in Google Data Studio, allowing a better visualisation of the results and the respondents’ answers. The phase that followed the structuring of the data was precisely the analysis of these results. For this, several meetings were scheduled with the Live Engineering management, which aimed to study the responses of the cluster members. Still, above all, they sought to identify problems and create mitigation actions for the main issues identified. The actions made as a way of mitigating the main difficulties were executed in phases by the various teams.
Final Words
The cognitive load process in the Live Engineering cluster is endless, as there is always room for improvement. Considering this variable, a monitoring process was defined, which consists of carrying out the cognitive load survey every six months, analysing the results and implementing actions, as described above. In this way, we remain aware of the difficulties of the team members and work towards building a happy and motivated cluster.
References
- Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4
- https://www.devopsinstitute.com/team-cognitive-load/
- https://aboutfarfetch.com/
Originally published at https://www.farfetchtechblog.com on November 7th, 2023.
