2 hours a day adds up quickly to lots of days of lost time.

The other day, my mom and I were talking about blogging.  I mentioned that I had noticed that there are significantly fewer views on a weekend than during the week, which led me to advise her to blog frequently during the week and take a much-needed break on the weekend (who wants to lose traffic and their own weekend at the same time?).  She was curious as to why the weekend readership waned so dramatically- that’s simple, I said.  People like to pass time by playing on the internet during work, but they have plenty to do on the weekend to keep them otherwise occupied.  She marveled at this revelation and asked me a fantastically funny question, “Emily, doesn’t that make you wonder how much time people waste at work?”  This is actually a great question- the only reason it’s funny is that that very question is my job- I blog about it every week.  So, let me give you a few stats:

• -The average worker is distracted more than 2 hours every day
• -In other words, he is interrupted more than 70 times a day
• -Many estimate that it takes a solid half-hour to get back in the zone after being disrupted

So, no, I don’t wonder how much time people waste at work- I know, and I seek to offer possible solutions.  If you’ve read this blog for long, you’ll know that I lean towards acoustic treatments, such as sound masking.  While I wholeheartedly believe that the individual worker can make acoustic and ergonomic adjustments on his or her own, I also suspect that not many actually take matters into their own hands.  They chalk it up to working in an open office and assume there is no long-term solution.  Or they try ear plugs or headphones, only to miss important phone calls or jam to their favorite song.

Office Sound Masking

That’s why I urge at the managerial level to take action on behalf of your employees.  Even simple acoustic adjustments, such as sound masking systems enable your workers to stay focused and therefore improve productivity.  That’s great for your business, but it’s also good news at the employee-level, as well.   When annoying distractions are properly dealt with, even stress levels improve.  Consider the following improvements from improved speech privacy levels:

1. -Focus: the ability of office workers to focus on their tasks improved by 48%
2. -Distractions: “conversational distractions” decreased by 51%
3. -Error-rates: performance of standard “information-worker” tasks (measured in terms of accuracy [error-rates] and short-term memory) improved by 10%
4. -Stress: when measured in terms of the actual physical symptoms of stress, stress was reduced by 27%

As always, I’ll leave you with this- consider the value of productivity and happy, less-stressed workers.  What is that worth to you?

On a scale from 1-10, how engaged do you think your workers are?

“I get so easily distracted at work that I lose focus and can’t concentrate. I actually welcome the distractions because I would rather play than work! It’s a good thing that I am unemployed. I have no work to be distracted from!”  (taken from a real blog!)

While most people won’t celebrate unemployment in this economy, most probably would agree that distraction at work is not only common, it’s your worst enemy.  Businesses like yours lost an estimated $700 billion in 2008 as a result of distractions, conversational distractions the biggest contributor.

Sadly, distractions are part and parcel to working collaboratively in a multiple-office work space and certainly among the cubicle farm.  However, distractions don’t have to be as devastating as hundreds of billions of dollars a year.  In fact, as a manager you can simply forbid your employees to speak or disconnect any phone that rings.  Just kidding.  Just like distraction, noise is also a part of every office- it simply needs to be managed.  Many businesses opt to install office-wide sound masking systems to help cover intrusive distractions.

Instead of forcing your employees to cope on their own (such as googling “distracted at work” or using headphones to drone out interruptions, both of which ironically further distract said worker ), take this serious problem into your own hands.  In this economy, every dollar counts- there really isn’t time to play table hockey.

What do you think of when you hear the word noise?  Here are a few online definitions of "noise:"

Noise (noun): noiz

• sound of any kind (especially unintelligible or dissonant sound); "he enjoyed the street noises"; "they heard indistinct noises of people talking …
• the auditory experience of sound that lacks musical quality; sound that is a disagreeable auditory experience; "modern music is just noise to me"
• electrical or acoustic activity that can disturb communication
• a loud outcry of protest or complaint; "the announcement of the election recount caused a lot of noise"; "whatever it was he didn’t like it and he was going to let them know by making as loud a noise as he could"
• incomprehensibility resulting from irrelevant information or meaningless facts or remarks; "all the noise in his speech concealed the fact that he didn’t have anything to say"
• make noise: emit a noise
• randomness: the quality of lacking any predictable order or plan
• any unwanted sound and in both analog and digital electronics, noise is an unwanted random addition to a wanted signal. 

It’s interesting that noise actually is a neutral term- it really is just a sound of any kind.  Yet, the first connotation most people have when they think of noise is that of being irritated or distracted by it.  That’sbecause most people associate noise with not being able to relax or concentrate.  So, whether it’s trying to fall asleep or attempting to be productive at work, noise is not a friendly interruption.  In fact, the average worker finds herself distracted more than 2 hours a day.  In a tough economy 2 hours day per worker is not a welcome sacrifice for any business. 

Sound masking

Your company doesn’t have to lose productivity to distractions in the work place.  A simple and easy solution is sound masking.  You can’t rid your office of distracting noise, but you can cover it with a low-level background sound similar to white noise.  By camoflaging irritating and distracting noise, you and your employees can reclaim those lost hours of unprodictivity. 

Distractions may not seem like a big problem.  Maybe your employees shoot off a few unnecessary texts or answer a couple personal calls.  Everybody does, right?  That’s the problem.  Everybody does, which means that the average worker loses more than two hours every day to distractions.  In fact, the work place, and open offices in general, have become so distracting that more than 70% of surveyed workers said that their productivity would be increased if their work place were less noisy.

How do you conduct business with less sound? 

While you can try to ban personal calls, you can’t keep people from making business calls, closing doors and flushing toilets.  That’s the cost of doing business.  But you can minimize the distraction level with sound masking.  Sound masking functions like white noise, cancelling out unwanted and distracting noise.  Unlike white noise, however, sound masking can be distributed uniformly and at the lowest volume necessary for maximum productivity.  That way, you’re not trading one problem for another. 

Contact us for more information on how to keep your employees focused on what really counts: work.

Malachowski, Dan.  Wasting Time at Work Costing Companies Billions.  Retrieved August 10, 2009, from http://www.davidsonstaffing.com/articles/salary/wasted-time/.

Mardex, Justin. (2004) Auditory, visual, and physical distractions in the workplace.  Retrieved August 17, 2009 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/13038258/Auditory-visual-and-physical-distractions-in-the-workplace

Whether intentionally or not, the average employee spends more than two hours of her work day distracted.  She starts a task and hears a phone ring.  She wonders who it is and whether it is a personal call.  She refocuses, only to hear the elevator ding.  She tries again and hears the copier start, so she leaves her desk to chat with her co-worker making copies.  Regardless of good intentions, this employee doesn’t stand a chance of being productive for more than a few minutes at a time.

Business must go on

We are in the worst recession in decades, yet deadlines and quotas must be met- all with less resources than you’ve ever had.  Getting work done with fewer staff in the same eight-hour day seems impossible.  Fortunately it isn’t.  Many companies like yours have turned to sound masking as a solution for office distractions.  Similar to the concept of white noise, treated areas are immune to the noisy interruptions that every open office inevitably has.  And, with direct-field technology, our system is precise and uniform, resulting in a quieter and more productive work environment for your employees. 

When resources are scarce, turn to a solution that is precise and no-maintenance.

Malachowski, Dan.  Wasting Time at Work Costing Companies Billions.  Retrieved August 10, 2009, from http://www.davidsonstaffing.com/articles/salary/wasted-time/.