The ‘tiktokenisation’ of professionals

The executives were not joking.

In a white-collar corporate world where the majority of work is done on a computer, the white-collar worker is now assailed daily by dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands, of electronic touchpoints of data via email, WhatsApp, text messages, and whatever information portal their professional roles require.

On the flip side of this, social media has been reduced to 30-second bite-sized clips of entertainment. From TikTok to Facebook to Instagram Reels, the social media consumer is now typically hunched over their gadgets, receiving entertainment in small doses and getting sucked into doom scrolling: swiping up or down to see the next bite-sized piece of entertainment or message.

Remember that your white-collar worker is also a social media consumer, and she is mentally applying the same level of energy to an email as she does to a WhatsApp message or video. Our gadgets have become our new addiction, and content has become the new dopamine. I see it in the classes I teach: adults struggling to tear their eyes away from their laptops or phones and pay attention in class.

Research published by Microsoft in 2015 found that the average human attention span had dropped in the previous 15 years from 12 seconds at the turn of the century in 2000 to eight seconds in 2015.

Apparently, this is a shorter attention span than that of a goldfish, which is lightheartedly referred to as having the shortest attention span in the animal kingdom at nine seconds. That research was conducted 10 years ago. Imagine now, with even more digital content.

The Microsoft research was undertaken in Canada. Closer to home, a survey by Fuzu, a career development platform in Africa, indicated that over 50 percent of employees in Kenya cited social media as a major distraction in the workplace.

Research from the African Development Bank found that young Africans, who are more inclined to use social media, exhibit tendencies toward shorter attention spans and reduced productivity.

A 2019 survey conducted by the World Bank showed that around 58 percent of Kenyan workers reported that social media was a major source of distraction, impacting their efficiency and ability to focus on tasks.

What’s the point here?

Recipients of your 300-word email do not go past the first paragraph, if you are lucky. Your meeting attendees do not pay attention to your 60-slide PowerPoint presentation, particularly if it’s full of text and graphs.

They mentally check out by slide two and swipe your face to the side as they move on to think about other things. If you’re lucky, they’re likely giving you a blank stare as they mentally transport themselves to their recreational spot of choice. If you’re unlucky, they are doom scrolling on their own gadgets and doing other things.

Your white-collar worker must now communicate in the digital age. They need to tell stories instead of parroting numbers and to “tiktokenise” their presentations and reports. The danger for the white-collar worker is the rapidly diminishing attention span of those receiving the reports for which they spend hours collating information and drafting.

If our executives can give the same reports to AI to summarise for them, then it makes sense to have AI generate an executive summary of your report and attach that as the first page of your 100-page detailed report.

And if you must present the same report, ask AI to convert your mind-numbingly boring text into graphics that represent your findings. Present that instead, and you might find a very receptive and engaged audience.

I hope you’re still here reading this piece 720 words later, before you swipe left to the next article!

The writer is a corporate governance specialist and a former banker. X: @carolmusyoka