Working in Isolation Improves Performance, Speed, and Accuracy

You could have never thought that your co-workers and your working environments are becoming important factors responsible for your slow performance. It is highly probable that your co-workers are not even aware of this fact also. Even their work performance might also be slowing down because of this same reason.

A recently concluded research by the scientists at the ‘University of Calgary’ under the leadership of Dr.Tim Welsh revealed that immaterial of the good or bad intentions, if anyone has someone else in his own vision of task performance it would more probably slow down his performance.

It is more like “a complex assembly line”, according to Dr Welsh. If you are performing on any specific task and you have someone else who is present across you performing a different task, you will end up in performing slow irrespective of the performance of that other person, he says.

An inbuilt response-interpretation mechanism interwoven with our nervous system is primarily the reason for such a performance behavior. It is very much like mimicking. When we observe someone doing something we also feel like doing the same. It is an automatic nervous system response. This typical behavior is actually a part of “our mirror neuron system”.

These research findings of Dr. Welsh are based on the concept of seeing and believing which ultimately activates the process of co-representation response in our mind.

Dr. Welsh conducted tests on two parameters. An individual was asked to perform a simple computer task alone first and then he was asked to perform the same task with the presence of another person who was performing a different but related task. In next stage the same individual was asked to perform the same task alone and it was informed to him that his co-performer is completing his task in another room.

Dr Welsh and co-researchers observed that the performance was considerably slowed down when the individual observed his partner actually performing. There was interference in his own work environment and that affected his performance.

On the other hand, when the co-performer left the same room this same individual could only see the results of his co-performer’s work instead of seeing him directly, the interference was automatically removed and researchers observed significant improvements in the performance. “We believe it’s because the individual no longer represented – or modeled – their partners’ actions, even though they could see the results of these actions”, said Dr. Welsh.

Dr. Welsh is quite hopeful that his research will help companies, corporations, organizations, and many businesses and industries to improve upon their settings and working environments in order to derive maximum advantages from the best performances of their workers.

Working in isolation could be the best suited work set up where speed and accuracy is much needed for any task accomplishment. “I think an argument could be made for a work setting”, says Dr. Welsh. Researchers feel that such a working environment will help in improving the individual’s performance and “will remove the involuntary modeling of another’s behavior”.

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