Remember this Top 10 Time Wasters in the Workplace infographic? I believe it’s time to bring it again into your attention.
Not everybody wastes time at work knowingly; distraction has many causes and the lack of employee engagement ranks first.
Unhappy employees make an unproductive company. If you thought all that employees care about is money, think again. Satisfaction asks for more than a paycheck – most of them need to:
Be valued – acknowledgment works like a magic wand when it comes to engagement
Be challenged – incentives are essential tools for every manager – get to learn your employees and get to learn what works miracles for them
Feel secure – instability isn’t really stimulating; fear alienates employees and this could be the start of an unfavorable relation on both sides.
But it’s not only distraction that makes employees lose time. There are also factors related to internal organizations that delay real work time:
Finding key information – The race for getting to the right information and the people holding it causes much of the downtime. That’s why it is so important to have a knowledge base to which everyone can turn into when in need. Mailing lists have some limitations.
Fixing other people’s mistakes – Human errors are normal and there is no such thing as the perfect employee. But what generates them? Well, there are many factors, but to name a few, we have poor communication, missing relevant information, making decisions under stress, over-perseverance. In the absence of a knowledge sharing system, most of these mistakes are repetitive.
Meetings – the problem with meetings is that they take time to schedule, usually there are too many people attending it and most of their participants consider 50% of the time spent in a meeting is wasteful. I’m not saying internal meetings can’t be productive, but what if you’d cut it in half?
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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