Here'S How Employees End Up Wasting 30 To 40 Percent Of Their Time

Ever wondered how a regular company becomes a Fortune 500 company? Their success is neither due to how different or path-breaking their idea was nor to how the audience embraced their products/services. The success is the result of how hard the employees have worked to realize company goals. For any business, employee productivity is the key to success. But what if your company is somewhere lacking in extracting the highest potential from its employees? What if the employees are proving to be unproductive even after working the entire day with utmost sincerity? 

An employee survey conducted by Salary.com revealed that around 61 % of employees waste between 30 minutes and one hour on work- and non-related tasks. This can have a huge impact on business productivity. 

This article shows how employees waste a significant amount of their work time and ultimately become unproductive. 

Factors affecting employee productivity

Employee engagement and performance are often decreased when employees are provided with inadequate and unorganized support. Thus, employees who work from the office or remotely need continuous support to resolve these issues. 

Often employees might face issues like: 

• The best way to fix a crashing laptop?
  
  
• What can I do if a password is invalid?
  
  
• Employee benefit programs etc.
  
  
• Access request to documents
  
  
• In need software installation assistance
  
  

In order to resolve these issues, they have to spend a lot of time finding the right information. The McKinsey report states that workforces waste around 1.8 hours of their working hours to obtain relevant information. This would result in a loss of monthly productivity. Responding to their queries will help employees to do their work without any distractions. 

Other Factors

Employees may face thousands of distractions - that starting with personal commitments, social media, meetings, multiple tasks at hand, the list goes on and on. Moreover, the Covid-19 outbreak has forced the entire corporate world to adopt work from home culture, thus making employees' productivity a bit opaquer, as there's no one to monitor you now and then. 

Here's a list of things that add up to the unproductivity of employees: 

1. Emails
   
   Do you know how much time an employee wastes reading and replying to his/her emails on average? Well, you'll be shocked to know that an average employee spends almost half of his day reading and replying to his emails. The emails can be of various kinds, say promotional, business, work-related or maybe social. However, out of all these various types of mails, only the ones related to work are important; the rest adds up to making an employee unproductive because, at that time, he's not working for the company.
   
   
2. Meetings
   
   You'll be surprised to know that about 47% of the employee population perceive meetings as the #1#1 time-waster in any company. (Source: Atlassian) Most of them feel that these meetings, especially the long ones, keep them away from delivering results most of the time. While 47% of the population believes these meetings to be a time-waster, the rest of them either daydream while in a meeting or do some other work. The number of meetings an employee might have to attend in a single day is quite overwhelming, making it a significant reason for unproductivity.
   
   
3. Multitasking
   
   This happens mainly with HR department, handling employee issues, identifying their needs, interviewing, recruiting, coordinating the workforce, and resolving employee issues. These are just a drop as compared to the ocean of tasks performed by an HR. However, many times, HR professionals are distracted and have to constantly go back and forth to solve employee problems or answer their questions. In such cases, the HR team has to concentrate more on responding to inquiries than on other tasks.
   
   
4. Recurring tasks
   
   A wide variety of tasks are done daily, which collectively eat up the overall working time of an employee, sometimes distracting him from giving more of his time to the more critical parts of the work. Some of these activities are:
   
   - Filling timesheet
   
   - Daily report for the work done that day
   
   - Managing spreadsheets
   
   - And much more
   
   Most of the HRs are also somewhere stuck in this cycle. Employees can directly contact HR about any questions related to their work or the company since HR is there in close contact. There are many queries and requests regarding work time or dress code, which keep coming up repeatedly and need to be addressed.
   
   
5. Lack of motivation
   
   Lack of motivation or focus is the most significant source of employee unproductivity. An employee can have no motivation for various reasons, maybe because of some personal issues or some issues at the workplace. There might be minor or even no incentives to make him feel that motivated to do the work.
   
   Read More: How well can a ticketing system streamline the tasks of HR agents
   
   
6. Social Media
   
   Hubstaff report states that, on average, an employee spends almost one and a half hours of his work time scrolling through social media apps, which makes it to about seven and a half hours of work time in a week. Almost a day's work time is spent using social media applications like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest etc., making it one of the most distractive things for any organization.
   
   
7. Personal conversations
   
   An employee also wastes a lot of time responding to personal phone calls or text messages. Also, even though there should be a friendly environment between co-workers in a company, constant monitoring should be done. As a result, the employees don't chat with each other the whole day in team building, thus increasing the organization's overall productivity.
   
   

Automation - The one-stop solution

Now that we've seen the primary speed breakers in the employees' productivity levels working in an organization, it's time to see what possible measures to mend the situation. 

Well, frankly, it might be out of the hands of an organization to prevent its employees from getting distracted at all because we must never forget that we are dealing with humans having a wide range of complex emotions and not some emotionless robot. Thus, getting distracted is a part of human emotion that can't be controlled entirely. 

However, there are also various other reasons for the unproductivity of the employees, which an organization can somehow control. 

"Automation" is a technological innovation that can be incredibly beneficial if appropriately utilized. Here are some points telling how automation can be a perfect one-stop solution to increase the productivity levels of your employees drastically: 

• As we've already seen how emailing eats a significant chunk of your employees' work time, we had no solution to this problem a few years back. It was the only fastest option available to delegate tasks. But now things have changed, and so does technology. Nowadays, we don't need to rely upon emails as now we have various automated ticketing software. Such software is not only capable of ticket creation but can also let you chat with another employee in real-time, eventually cutting down the entire time of the emailing process.
  
  
• With the introduction of automation in the industry, physical meetings are somewhere considered a waste of time. Now, automation has penetrated various business collaborative platforms like MS Teams, Zoom, etc. as well. So now, employees don't need to have a physical meeting every time since, with these automated tools, you can communicate with your team in real-time, solve each other's issues, plan, follow up, etc.
  
  
• There are various recurring processes that an employee might have to do daily, which thus cuts down his/her time that would have otherwise been utilized in doing more important tasks. But don't worry; automation has got you covered. This feature of automation is most useful for HRs as now they don't have to waste their time on tasks like:
  
  1) Solving repetitive employee problems
  
  2) Onboarding employees
  
  3) Taking feedback
  
  
  
  
• Since a lot of time is also wasted when there is too much back and forth while clearing doubts or resolving issues, automation integrated within platforms like MS Teams help you in communicating with your colleagues in real-time, it also enables you to get your issues resolved in the shortest time possible with the help of smart chatbot which is capable of resolving almost all types of your issues or else you can use the smart ticketing option to get expert help for your issues at your disposal.