Multitasking - is it that good for the employee?
More and more often, when companies tell me - we value multitasking in an employee, it means that he or she will be given more work than is realistic to do during the workday. Therefore, this expression makes me wary. What do you think about it?
Totally agree.
While an employee should be able to occasionally handle changing what they are focused on, in practice when I see anything about multitasking it seems to indicate that there is little/no priority given to the value of focused work and the company is not willing to dedicate resources to being proactive on issues and expects the norm to be that people are constantly in a reactive fire fighting mode.
Yes, the employee is under stress when a lot of tasks pile up. And productivity goes down.