Top 10 Office Distractions
According to this article, the Top 10 Office Distractions are:
- Telephone
- Paper
- Visitors
- Environment
- Noise
- Meetings
- Lists
- Expectations
- You
Whether you manage 1 or 100 employees, they each struggle with those internal and external distractions (and so do you!). They might rank them differently, but each distraction costs them a valuable chunk of time. In fact, many studies suggest that the average worker is distracted more than 2 hours every day! Two hours times every employee is a staggering loss of productivity.
Rewarding and Protecting Their Time
Just to be clear: you're shooting for happy workers, not ecstatic.
You can’t control for everything, but as a manager, it’s your job to step in and help relieve your employees from the stress of not getting their work done. It’s easy to assume that the average worker doesn’t mind being distracted at work. On the contrary, most employees report that they are irritated by distractions and just want a place to do distraction-free solo work. Sure, there are probably a handful of office slackers who are just fine with less work, but most of your employees are frustrated with the loss of productivity- for many, it means nights and weekends, and for others, it’s lower commission levels. According to Frank C. Barnett, a marketing expert, “ownership of the job is huge“, which is why he is trying to reward mastery of a task/job not just with money, but also with something more internal- the feel of success and the knowledge of a job well-done, even the controversial ability to build their own brand on the company’s dime and with their reputation.
In addition to building a great incentive plan, you still need to provide a great work environment. The biggest time suck at work is conversational distraction. Whether 2 employees are chatting it up themselves or several are unwitting recipients of sales calls, there is no reason with today’s technology, such as sound masking, that any office worker should fall prey to noisy distractions. By covering unwanted noise with low-level white noise, you keep everyone focused on their own work.
By protecting and rewarding your worker’s time, you increase productivity and decrease stress levels- everybody’s happy.