Going to work does not necessarily mean that someone is working.
How many times do you feel distracted and unproductive during working hours?
Do you know how much time you waste in a week and how much it costs to your company?
According to a study by Salary.com, an employee wastes 2.09 hours per day, and an employee’s mismanagement of time results in an estimated $759 billion annual cost to companies.
Finishing your work hours with unfinished tasks can lead to missing deadlines and disappointed clients.
Companies need to help employees manage their time and complete their to-do lists by the end of the day for efficient results. This will also save billions of dollars for the company.
Let’s look at some common time-wasting activities that affect workplace productivity.
Common time-wasting activities in the workplace
01. Overwhelming Emails:
Every day, employees send and receive hundreds of emails, making it difficult for them to focus and causing them to become unproductive time wasters.
According to a study, an average employee receives 304 emails weekly, and they check their email 36 times in an hour. Annual productivity costs for employees checking spam emails cost $1250 and $1800 for unnecessary emails.
02. Meetings:
An average employee attends 62 meetings per week, and half of the meetings are considered a time waste because such meetings have no specific agendas. More than half of the employees spend these meetings sleeping and daydreaming.
Most of the employees feel overwhelmed and tired during the meeting and many spend doing their tasks in between meetings.
Many employees also complain about meetings being a time-wasting activity that affects workplace productivity.
03. Complex repetitive tasks:
Did you know an employee spends one entire working day a week doing repetitive tasks like filling out manual timesheets, updating what they did in a day, creating fancy slides, and formatting spreadsheets?
These are such tasks that waste an ample amount of time and money.
When employees must be doing tasks of their specific areas of expertise, they have to perform unnecessary and repetitive tasks on a daily basis.
04. Multitasking:
Achieving multiple things at once is nearly impossible. One can not focus on two things with the same focus. Multitasking is just a productivity-draining myth.
Multitasking reduces employee productivity and makes them exhausted very soon.
Additionally, it affects the quality of work because employees tend to multitask in order to meet deadlines.
Your company can develop a bad reputation and lose money if it produces poor-quality work.
05. Not allowing employees to reach their full potential:
It’s the manager’s job to challenge their employees to meet their full potential by allowing them to do tasks themselves and find faults.
In various companies, the leader doesn’t give their employees real work and allow them to grow. The company is paying such employees to yield top-quality results with work that provides value to the company but instead, the companies are just paying greater salaries for unnecessary tasks.
Hence, hire someone who has the potential to distribute important tasks and who knows how to manage a team. Your company could save millions if you allow your employees to face challenges.
How to influence employees to stop wasting time and increase productivity
Introduce time tracking:
It’s very important to know if your employees are being productive during work hours or not.
Time Tracking Software allows employees to keep track of their work and productivity. Tools like KonarkPro will show you exactly how you use your working hours.
A recent study by SHRM shows that 79% of employees do not have any problem with time tracking software as they believe it increases their productivity and time management.
Schedule time for important tasks:
Normalize blocking time for important tasks as it requires deep focus to produce quality work. Interrupting your team and employees with meetings and other distractions can be challenging. Hence, provide a no meeting day and encourage team members to block their time during important tasks.
The best thing an employee can do is to put a do-not-disturb status while working remotely. While working in the office, employees can use headphones to stay focused.
Clear meeting agendas:
Clarify meeting agendas beforehand and avoid meetings if the information can be shared via an email or a message. Meetings with unnecessary discussions and unclear agendas leads employees to be unproductive.
Keep the idea and brainstorming ready before the meeting so you don’t waste time mapping the agenda of the meeting.
This encourages employees to stay focused on their tasks and feel less overwhelmed with all the meetings.
Avail the right tools:
Providing employees with the right tools to minimize their work can save a lot of time. Automation of time tracking and timesheet software, pre-designed templates, and other common tasks can enhance workplace productivity and reduce wasted time.
Conclusion
Managing time at the workplace not only helps your organization grow but can also save a huge amount of money that gets drained whenever employees get distracted or waste time. Encourage your team to be responsible and avoid distractions and tasks that waste their time daily.
With KonarkPro , organizations can easily monitor their employees’ productivity. Furthermore, it automates timesheets, which saves time, and your to-do list will be completed by the end of the day.