The Ergonomics Open Journal, 2011, 4, 23-27 23 1875-9343/11 2011 Bentham Open Open Access The Social Nature of Work Fragmentation: Revisiting Informal Workplace Communication Aabhaas Arora 1 , Víctor M. González *,2 and Stephen J. Payne 3 1 Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Booth Street East, M1, Manchester, UK 2 Department of Computer Science, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), México 3 Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK Abstract: Informal workplace communication is a central component of work and fundamental to understand its fragmentation. Previous studies point to external interruptions and multi-tasking preferences as the source of work fragmentation. Yet, although some empirical evidence exists on the role played by social informal interactions on interrupting work, we lack a more precise understanding of the degree of embeddedness they have within people’s activities in the workplace. Based on the analysis of behavior of 28 information workers in the retail industry, this paper explores the nature of work fragmentation from the perspective of social informal interactions, aiming at shedding more light on the general phenomenon of multi-tasking in the workplace. Our results indicate that brevity and fragmentation of work is also common in the retail industry, and show that social (non-work related) informal interaction account for 9.7% of the activity observed, trigger about 21% of the external interruptions and are mostly initiated by colleagues. Keywords: Social informal interactions, work fragmentation, switching, interruptions, non-related work, multi-tasking. 1. INTRODUCTION Social informal interactions among people in the workplace are a common and often taken for granted part of the nature of most professional work activities. The effect of these interactions on people’s productivity, however, is not clearly understood. Studies reporting on the experiences of tele-workers and people working from home often refer to them missing social interactions and finding ways to accommodate regular visits to the workplace in order to keep strong ties with co-workers [1]. Paradoxically, other studies highlight social interactions as a source of disruption and work fragmentation. For instance, Perlow reports on the practices of a software company and how excessive interruption took them to implement a negotiated time allocation strategy – quiet time during the morning when people were not supposed to interrupt each other – which was aimed to maximize sustained focus on solo work [2]. Beyond social bonding, whether or not social informal interactions have positive or negative consequences can also be understood from the perspective of work fragmentation and interruptions which has also been extensively reported in the literature (e.g. [3, 4]). The main focus of this paper is to explore the way in which social informal workplace communication is actually embedded into people’s activities and results in work frag- mentation. Our view on informal workplace communication *Address correspondence to this author at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), México; Tel: +52 55 5628 4000, Ext. 3614; Fax: +52 55 5628 4065; E-mails: victor.gonzalez@itam.mx, victor.gonzalez@acm.org is based on that proposed by Kraut et al. [5] who discussed the value of this type of communicative behavior to enhance production functions (work related) and social functions (non-work related). They argue that through social informal non-work related communication, people sustain themselves as a group and support the needs of individual members [5]. Studies following up the direction proposed by Kraut et al. usually take an approach that does not necessarily differentiate between production and social functions of informal workplace communication, and instead emphasizes its interactive, synchronous, and spontaneous character. For instance the study conducted at Hewlett Packard (HP) labs in the early nineties [2, 6], although it focuses on enhancing our understanding about the nature and effects of informal communication, falls short of addressing how many of those exchanges are work-related or non-work related and how this affects work fragmentation. More recently, often referring to the results reported by O’Conaill and Frohlich in their HP case [2], many studies have focused on the way people multitask and handle interruptions in the workplace [e.g. [3, 7, 8]. These studies have confirmed findings from managerial research [9, 10] and have extended our understanding about the fragmented nature of information work in general. However, most analyses tend to look at the sources of work fragmentation with regards the origin (external/internal) or the channels triggering the switching of activity, rather than work relatedness and the role of informal social interactions. The significance of the work presented here lies in the fact that social informal aspects cannot be ignored while understanding workplace behavior, and, as has been shown