![]() ![]() ![]() it is common to come across strict workplace rules that bars employees and staff from accessing their smartphones or any other digital devices during work hours. No doubt, in many service-oriented industries, like hotels and restaurants, hospitals, etc. Official to personal emails, text messages, social media, calls, chats, notifications, and updates – all of these are enough to distance us from our work-in-hand. The new era of technology-oriented work has one of the biggest side-effects. This is one of the biggest sources of distractions at work. These apply irrespective of whether one is in a remote work setting or working in a physical office space. Generally speaking, these are the broad four types of distractions at work. A researcher named Basex summarized after info-tech research that US companies lose as much as $588 billion every year due to lost productivity.Another statistic that leaves us stupefied is that an average employee checks his email at least 74 times a day, while the people sitting higher up check as many as 435 times each day.According to this report, if organizations and individuals knew how to handle communication technology better, they could produce upto $1.3 trillion more every year.High-skilled workers spend about 28% of their productive hours every day in these digital distractions, as per a report from McKinsey. ![]() The University also found that 50% of our distractions are self-induced – which means that we can stay away and not surrender ourselves to the temptations of checking our cell phone or emails, but we choose not to.So, if we spend about 60 seconds checking messages on WhatsApp or Twitter, we lose not just that one minute but about 24 minutes and 15 seconds of our time. What this effectually means is that not only do we lose the time that we spend entertaining the distraction – for examples, checking the phone for updates, revert to messages from friends and family on social media, or taking a quick shot at an online game – we also take almost half-an-hour more to refocus on the work that we were doing before the distraction occurred.The University of California, Irvine has studied digital distractions in detail. This is the time that one takes to get back to the task that he/she was doing before the interruption. 23 minutes and 15 seconds is exactly the time we lose when get distracted.What statistics say about distractions at work? And what value would businesses have put on that before the pandemic…įrom young students in schools to the topmost managers in an organization – each one of us today is afflicted with the digital craving to such an extent that it invariably influences our attention span, and accordingly our productivity at work. A sobering thought is that if we were to be as productive and focused as the generations gone-by, we could have been even more successful than we have been. No doubt we as a generation are not as productive as our parents or generations previous to that even though financially and economically we may be out-performing what they achieved. Someone somewhere said this so very accurately – we are living in a culture of distractions. Blame it on the smartphone, social media, streamed entertainment, online games with augmented reality, or any other such overwhelming sources, there are abundant ways for people to digress from the work-in-hand and get distracted. The truth of the present time is that we are surrounded by distractions, all our waking hours. With multiple sources of distractions around, enterprises need to act fast to adopt tools that reduce distractions at work. Shocking but true! Whether in the workplace or remote working, distraction impacts cost because it affects productivity. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |