What's Killing Productivity? And What Should You Not Do?

 

You'd like to make sure everyone on your project team is productive, but you know they aren't as productive as they could be. But what are the key productivity killers? Is it in the corporate culture? Is it simply smartphones? What about other distractions? What about meetings? If you knew, then perhaps you can intervene successfully.

Careerbuilder conducted a survey recently of employers to find out what were the major distractors. (If you've followed this blog much, you know that "obstacles to productivity" is an ongoing theme and we look at different related surveys and studies from different sources and perspectives to come up with solutions.)

Try to pick the top 5 from this list of the top 10. Remember this is a survey of employers.

• Meetings
• Gossip
• Social media
• Email
• Cell phones/texting
• The Internet
• Co-workers dropping by
• Smoke breaks/snack breaks
• Noisy co-workers
• Sitting in a cubicle

There are a lot of distractions on this list that you see every week if not every day, Certainly it would be worth your while to intervene by ensuring members of your team are at least mindful of what is likely keeping them from completing their tasks on time.

According to the CareerBuilder survey, employers reported the following as the top 5:

1. Cell phones/texting: 52 percent
2. The Internet: 44 percent
3. Gossip: 37 percent
4. Social media: 36 percent
5. Email: 31 percent

Did you guess the top 5? Do you suspect your workplace may have different top 5 distractors?

In any case, what can you do about distractions in your project? It's better to be precise in your comments.

• If you want to quickly target the most of the top 5, then think about commenting on using devices for non-work activity and the reduction of productivity that is the result. People generally know that they are distracted, so your reminder will help them manage themselves.
• You can even try an informal reminder like, "I just saw a CareerBuilder survey about workplace distractions and a common source was from our screens. We all see people multitasking, sometimes with smartphones on non-work items. Let's keep this to a minimum as we are two weeks away from the next project deadline." This helps the team manage itself. No one wants to be seen following celebrity news when a big deadline is looming. They know that their output is needed by the team and the project.

What you should do is important, but more important may be what you should NOT do.

• Avoid finding one person doing something such as texting a family member during a meeting and then sending out a nastygram to the whole team about smartphone abuse keeping the team from meeting the deadline. That just brings about resentment and reduces trust in your leadership. Worse, it may come about that the one distraction was not trivial, and that the worker was dealing with a hospitalized family member. Then you look like a jerk and your point is lost. Maybe you have seen that happen before.
• Also keep from micro-managing everyone's time. Workplaces often depend on many hours being worked so that workers may have to take care of some personal business at work. This is not necessarily a problem and could be positive. Be flexible in these circumstances.

Your message should instead concentrate on the distractions related to unimportant and non-urgent non-work activities. Everyone will understand that.

What are major distractions in your workplace? How do you cope with them?