Rogers Text Messaging

Survey: Distracted Workers Costing Companies Millions

It's not necessarily your employees checking their personal e-mail or chatting on Facebook all day costing your company money. According to a recent survey, distractions caused by these things, along with badly designed office technology can cost some businesses more than $10 million a year.

The survey conducted by software company harmon.ie and research firm uSamp, found that nearly 60% of work interruptions involve tools like e-mail, social media, text messaging and instant messaging, as well as switching windows among standalone tools and applications. The survey also found that 45% of employees work for only 15 minutes at a time or less without being interrupted, and 53% waste at least one hour a day due to various distractions.

The survey was conducted among 515 workers in sales, marketing, human resources or legal departments for U.S. companies with 1,000 or more workers. These distractions cost businesses $10,790 a year per worker, according to the survey.

David Lavenda, vice president of Marketing and Product Strategy for harmon.ie, said he was surprised to find that employees waste a ton of time searching for work documents on their computers. Respondents said they spend an average of 2.5 hours a week trying to find the documents they need in multiple locations—corporate and cloud. This is an average of 16 work days each year—enough to account for an employee's vacation time.

"Companies are investing in more technologies, and these are all things that are supposed to add productivity, make people available and able to do things quicker," Lavenda said. "It's a huge advantage to have people be accessible all the time, but people don't realize how much time they waste."

Having multiple devices at one's desk contributes to the issue of being distracted—65% of respondents said they utilize up to three additional monitors, sometimes simultaneously with their main computer screen when they work.

"People are just being pushed to the limit for how long they can be interrupted," Lavenda said.  "There is a feeling that we are always being inundated with information."

Some workplaces are adopting strategies to help tackle this issue and keep their workers focused, even though some of the time lost is due to company structure or policy. Nearly 70% of respondents said their employers have implemented policies or technologies to minimize distractions, and 73% said they have adopted self-imposed techniques to stay concentrated on their work.

Reminder: Rogers/Fido To Increase Text Message Rate To $0.20 Per ...

As indicated, if you are in any kind of text messaging plan, you have nothing to worry about. But for anyone paying per-message right now, the rate is changing for the worse.

So if you don’t already have a text messaging plan, but do send/receive a few messages a month, maybe check out the Rogers text messaging add-ons so you are not paying additional fees.

Ecscw 2001, Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 16-20 September 2001, Bonn, Germany

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