The Cost of Workforce Distractions: Behaviors You Can’t Afford to Ignore

It is estimated that American businesses lose around $650 billion a year through workplace distractions. A survey of 515 employees by the software company, harmon.ie, showed that the majority of people waste at least one hour per day at work by a variety of different things—but primarily social networking, e-mail and web surfing.

Results from a recent Workplace Options survey indicate that more than half of those polled (53 percent) said distractions in the workplace negatively impact their productivity. The most distracting activities reported in that survey were:

• Personnel (office romances, water cooler gossip, etc.): 24%
• Technology (e-mails, phone calls, social media, internet glitches): 23%
• Meetings/luncheons: 12%
• Surroundings (loud co-workers, music or television noise, lack of privacy): 6%
• Celebrations (birthdays, baby showers, sports): 4%

To avoid workplace distractions, 42 percent of workers said they extended their workdays by coming in early or staying late. Nearly 22 percent knew of someone in their workplace who'd been fired for wasting time in the office, disrupting other employees or partaking in other distractions.

When it comes to minimizing workplace distractions, is your management style solving or contributing to the problem? Here are a few suggestions that may help everyone on your team get and stay more focused:

• Bring up the topic of e-mail management in staff meetings. Do employees need to respond immediately to e-mails (from customers, etc.) or can they set aside ten minutes at the end of every hour for reading and responding to e-mails?
• Put chitchat on the table. Are people overloaded with drop-bys to their cubes? Do they need strategies for getting more alone time—like posting "Do Not Disturb" signs when they are truly hunkering down on a project? Brainstorm a friendly way for employees to terminate conversations that aren't work-related.
• Make sure that birthday parties and recognitions aren't consuming more office time than employees or managers want them to. Sometimes there's one employee who's gung-ho about celebrations—but his or her zeal is not truly shared by all co-workers. If so, it's a distraction that can be trimmed.

On a regular basis, ask what's working and what's not working at staff meetings. For example, do you need to have so many meetings? If people feel they're participating in more meetings than they need to in order to get the work done, that's an area where you might be able to reclaim some of the time lost to other distractions.

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