Distractions That Kill Workplace Productivity
No matter how focused or determined you are as a professional, there’s no way you can make it through a day of work without interruptions. A recent study by Effective at Home suggests that an average employee gets less than three hours of distraction-free work every day, whether they’re working remotely or from the office, alone or with a team, or at any hour of the day.
Since the start of COVID-19, workplace productivity has become a hot topic in most industries as organizations look to get the best out of their teams. They’re looking to ensure employees stop drifting away from a specific task at hand until it’s completed.
However, this is proving to be rather difficult as workplace distractions are growing. Plus, the new business, as usual, isn’t making things easier. Today, more people are working from their homes and blending their professional and personal lives. Similarly, modern workplaces can become loud and disturbing to people.
In this post, we’ll share eight workplace distractions that kill our productivity and prevent us from doing our jobs quickly or properly. However, before we dive into them, we’ll briefly explain the relationship between workplace productivity and distractions.
The Relationship Between Workplace Productivity and Distractions
A distraction can be defined as anything that pulls your attention away from what you’re doing at the moment and starts doing anything else. Unfortunately, our attention span is rapidly declining with the influx of technology and sharp changes in our lifestyles. Therefore, it has become more difficult than ever before to keep yourself in a focused state for a long time, especially when working.
This is because your brain naturally wants more pleasurable experiences. Therefore, it welcomes distractions in many forms, whether it’s via conversations or infinite scrolling on Facebook. This inversely proportional relationship between productivity and distractions can become hazardous to employees and businesses in extreme cases.
Perhaps, the most immediate impact of distractions is workflow disruption. When distractions make us unproductive, we tend to work longer and often fail to complete our tasks. In workplaces with consequential processes, this can become a big problem. If the issue persists, it can make others frustrated as they have to rely on unproductive employees to get their work done as well.
When things slow down, the overall operational efficiency is impacted, which results in profit or revenue loss.
8 Workplace Distractions that Can Affect Your Productivity
1. Noises
Let’s start with the most simple form of distraction – noise. By definition, this is any type of unwanted or unpleasant sound that causes disturbances.
This could be anything from employees gossiping to your doorbell ringing, dogs barking, or machines rumbling. Whether you have excellent hearing or a short attention span, any form of noise can affect your concentration and stop you from continuing what you’re doing.
At the very least, it would prompt you to take the required action to reduce the noise. In worst-case scenarios, noise could result in delays or mistakes – both factors that can make you unproductive and lower your performance.
2. Hunger
Most people don’t know this, but hunger is one of the biggest productivity killers in the workplace. Not eating before or during your shift can make it almost impossible to focus, as your mind will constantly remind you that you’re working on an empty stomach. Moreover, by being hungry during work, you’re reducing the amount of glucose your brain receives.
This reduces focus and concentration further and can lead to fatigue and poor performance. On paper, working throughout the day without any breaks sounds more productive since you’re dedicating all your time to work. However, taking breaks to fuel your body can revitalize your body and mind, enabling you to work faster and more effectively.
3. Clutter
This might sound odd, but a cluttered workstation can lead to a cluttered mind. According to a study by Princeton University, chaos and disorder can restrict your ability to focus and process information. This makes employees working from their beds, in messy workstations, or in unusual environments less productive. Working in cluttered environments long-term can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression.
4. Multi-Tasking
Multi-tasking has been considered one of the most important soft skills any employee can have. However, research suggests that multi-tasking is one of the most frequent causes of distractions in the workplace. By focusing on multiple tasks at a time, you’re allocating a portion of your attention, energy, and time to each one. As a result, each task becomes longer or more difficult to complete.
Moreover, doing many things at once can lead to stress and anxiety – both factors that can affect workplace productivity and degrade work quality further.
5. Conversations with Friends or Family
Whether you’re working from home or office, you’re bound to communicate with your peers at different intervals for the day. This includes chatting with your work buddy on WhatsApp or Telegram or talking to your spouse or kids during your shift. Unfortunately, many people fail to set boundaries and allocate their time responsibly.
As a result, they often drift away in unimportant conversations when they should be focusing on completing their tasks. When this becomes a habit, many workers look for excuses to talk to others and waste time. Eventually, this becomes a problem for management due to reduced productive output and the development of negative workplace habits that can influence others as well.
6. Emails and Notifications
Whether you’re working from home or the office, any form of notification, be it an email or text message, can leave you in suspense. More importantly, it can tempt you to leave what you’re doing and end your curiosity. In many cases, emails and texts aren’t even work-related, which makes things worse, and going through them anyway can prompt you to work longer or make unnecessary mistakes.
Ideally, you should set a time to check all your emails or messages, even if you’re working in a synchronous communication environment. Similarly, remote workers can let their teams know what to expect in terms of response times, so they don’t have to drop everything and cater to their requests. Self-control is the name of the game, and you need to learn how to play it to remain productive.
7. Smartphone Usage
We live in an age where smartphones have become an indispensable part of our professional lives. We use them to communicate with our co-workers, access files via apps or the internet, and store important information.
However, modern smartphones have become the ultimate source of distraction due to social media apps, streaming services, games, and other forms of entertainment available at our fingertips. Most apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Netflix, are highly addictive and can cause force us to drift away for hours at a time if we’re not being supervised.
As a consequence, tasks get delayed, or the quality of work decreases. And the worst part is that most employees understand this. Yet, it’s incredibly difficult to break the habit.
8. Smoke Breaks
According to research, habitual or chain smokers are likely to be the least productive of all workers who smoke. This is because the effect of nicotine wears off quickly, prompting them to get up at different intervals during the day. The more time they spend away from their workstations, the more unproductive they become, especially if they work from the office with dedicated smoking rooms.
Next, we have social smokers who use strategic smoke breaks to get together with other employees and talk about work or other things. Although this is regarded as a more positive use of time, it doesn’t change the fact that non-smokers are more productive.
Smoking affects health in several ways. For instance, it reduces the brain’s processing power by reducing its oxygen supply temporarily. It also affects physical fitness and endurance, leading to fatigue and absenteeism.
To put all this into perspective, research by Harvard University shows that the annual cost of lost productivity for smokers is close to $4,500 a year. In contrast, non-smokers and casual smokers cost companies around $2,700 and $3,250 respectively, in terms of annual productivity losses.
Conclusion
So, there you have it – 8 distractions that can kill your workplace productivity. However, this list is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are so many things that can stop us from focusing on the task at hand and indulging in something else.
Regardless of what distracts you, you must employ different strategies to optimize productivity. For instance, you can put your phone on silent and assign special ringtones for your co-workers, so you only answer when it’s them texting or calling.
Similarly, you can adjust your work hours if your company allows it to reduce distractions caused by any of the factors above.
