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?