According to Zippia’s research, employees are distracted every 3 minutes, and the average employee is productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes daily. That’s only 31% of an 8-hour workday. This number equates to hours of lost productivity over a five-day workweek. That’s why it is critical to be aware of workplace distractions and take steps to eliminate or at least minimize them. 

Apparently, a digital workload solution is a perfect choice for you to deal with distracted employees.

Why Do Employees Get Distracted At Work?

Technology boosts your productivity in some ways while hindering it in others. Employees are distracted by digital tools at their fingertips, such as social media, apps, gaming, email, texting, and enterprise social. These distractions, however, are not limited to technology.

Employees’ attention spans can be jeopardized by various factors, including chatty coworkers, office noise, and even simple activities such as eating, drinking, or smoking can threaten an employee’s attention span.

Digital burnout

Digital burnout is a problem that employees are experiencing more and more of in this technological age, particularly with the hybrid working trend. The severity of this issue is closely correlated with employee productivity and burnout at work.

The reasons for employee burnout come from many elements. Still, the lack of digital detox is the blameworthy factor that people mostly disregard.

A 2022 survey of device users in the United States discovered that 74% of those who had experienced job burnout in their careers took at least two hours of daily breaks from their digital devices. Furthermore, 30% of users who had never or seldom engaged in a digital detox reported being burnt out at work.

Business environments rely heavily on digital devices. While laptops, desktops, and screens are used for most day-to-day tasks performed by business teams, the pandemic caused many changes in workplace operations. Too much screen time leads to digital burnout, which causes workplace stress.

Due to the constant use of digital devices, you may experience exhaustion, distraction, anxiety, apathy, depression, or diminished interest in your job.

Besides that, employees are easily distracted by messages from social media, email, or apps on their phones and computers while spending most of their time in front of a screen. It catches their attention, and they end up wasting countless hours on those sites amusing themselves.

=> This is: How you can manage burnout employees effectively

Other Common Distractions at the Workplace

Technically, there are some other reasons make your employee distracted from work, it could be:

• Involved in gossip with co-workers
• Cluttered workspace
• Or maybe just the “interior” problems: cause they were hungry, headache, etc.

The distracted employee often finds themselves involved in gossip with their coworkers. Up to 80% of employees blame chatty coworkers for their lack of focus on the job. Distracted employees are far less productive cause the average time it takes to get back to the task is 23 minutes (according to a University of California Irvine study)

Another source of external distraction is a cluttered workspace. If your workspace is a shambles, your thinking is also. Because of how your brain works, the less tidy your workspace is, the less likely you are to focus on the tasks. Decluttering your surroundings will set the tone for a more productive mindset and enable you to work more effectively.

Last but not least, workplace distractions research shows there aren’t just exterior forces at play. For instance, when you are hungry, your body will try to let you know that you need to eat by making you lose all feelings of focus. Regularly providing nutritious snacks to employees will ultimately increase productivity.

How To Deal With Distracted Employees?

There is no doubt that the problem that all organizations have to deal with is distracted employees. This is a long journey, but it is worth it for both companies and employees. Employee productivity, motivation, self-assurance, and general contentment increased when workplace distractions were reduced.

Get digital detox at work

Because of technology at work, people are forced to spend much time in front of displays. However, this can be bad for your mental and physical health. This is why it’s crucial to implement specific strategies, such as taking frequent breaks, maintaining a particular posture, and keeping a set distance from the computer.

According to research from the Workplace Productivity Report, employees who take breaks at least once every 90 minutes are more focused and productive.

Instead of eliminating digital tools from the working process, which seems impossible, smart use of these devices is what we recommend.

Introduce a digital project and task management application to assist your staff in allocating blocks of time each day to a specific activity. They can minimize their workload and save the time and attention they devote to that particular task.

Additionally, instruct them to turn off notifications while working on particular tasks to minimize interruptions and maintain focus.

Redesign the workload as well as the work environment

• What are the duties of the position, both those listed in the job description and those that the employee consistently seems to carry out?
• How is the set-up of the office? 
• How are the desk’s layout and lighting? 
• What other elements affect the worker’s productivity, effectiveness, and output?

Recognize that if the workplace and the job are poorly structured, your highly skilled employees will continue to underperform—not for their own faults, but for the ineffective job design.

Time management is the best key

While limiting the time your distracted employees spend using personal devices is a great way to start, even distractions from the office, like emails, may chew up important time.

The basis of productivity is effective time management, and this is particularly true when it comes to reducing distractions while working. By imparting time management techniques to your team members, you can help them make the most of every minute.

=> Related Article: Measure Your Employee Productivity Effectively

How Can A Digital Tool Like Opus Help Reduce Employee Distractions?

Opus is the one that will reinvent business productivity by cutting down on employee distraction, eliminating wasteful time, and improving workforce efficiency.

Tasks delivering

Excessive workload is also a significant factor leading to burnout. Not being able to manage work also makes employees easily distracted and work superficially. 

In the dashboard of Opus, with an intuitive and minimalist interface design, all employees can easily track projects and tasks that need to be completed during the day. Workflow, Project/Task and Content Management for creating, reviewing, approving and maintaining content all combined in just one display.

Especially the priority and deadline feature makes it easy for employees to manage and arrange their work. There won’t be time for you to get distracted or work on other trivial things when you know that a task must be accomplished quickly.

Time Management

Opus expands on task management for content creation. You can easily keep track of your project thanks to this management. Real-time reporting and analytics provide teams and their impact on the effective use of applications and actionable intelligence about users.

From there, you can easily manage your work progress and look up the time spent on each different task.

Searching for information can be a significant drain on your time and productivity. You may recreate the system multiple times to find the proper keyword phrasing for your desired answer.

In addition to recognizing where the end user needs help and serving up the right content. OPUS also offers job aids in different content formats that can speed up your working process.

Recording feature applied to measure employee productivity

Opus makes creating content simple, just click record and perform a task. Opus automatically captures each field keystroke and clicks in the process, then just customize the recording to meet your specific needs. This helps reduce the time required to create training content by 75% or more. You can generate various outputs from a single recording to meet your users’ needs.

Because Opus enables collaboration between teams at every stage of the digital adoption process, managers can easily find out about the employee and how much time they spend on each task. That’s also the best way to measure employee productivity.

Conclusion

Fighting workplace distractions is important for everyone involved in a company’s operations, from employees to employers and managers. Opus is a digital tool that you should consider for the advantages of a distraction-free workplace, including enhanced productivity and work quality.