Time Killers At Work: How To Avoid Them
Here are four ways we lose precious time at work, and alternatives that can return hours to our weeks.
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Into each workday must fall activities that do nothing but suck time, hurt productivity, and siphon the very life force out of you. How many meetings have you walked out of wishing you had those lost hours of your life back? How many quick Internet searches have you started at work that ended up leading you down a black hole of lost productivity? When was the last time you found value in your company's Byzantine employee review process?
Wasted time on the job is a significant problem. One study estimates that time-wasting activities at work cost businesses well into the 12 figures.
Some productivity killers are employee-driven, while others are designed into workplace processes or even into our office building designs themselves. On the following pages, you'll see a rogue's gallery of workplace time-killers. Lest these make you lose your will to work, we offer an alternative to each time-waster that is more productive, serves similar goals, and can keep you and your employees content.
Once you've reviewed the following options, be sure to tell us in the comments section below which workplace time wasters -- and time-savers -- you've personally engaged in, and how they've affected your workday.
"A little learning is a dangerous thing." -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"
Web browsing on company time happens. In fact, we recommend it in some cases.
However, when it comes to health, the Web is a place where good intentions can go horribly wrong. Health websites such as WebMD have become extremely popular, if for no other reason than to feed our latent hypochondriac neuroses. We can easily fall down a black hole reading about a particular, relatively benign symptom we're having, only to become convinced after a few clicks that we have a terminal illness and certain death is mere hours away. (WebMD even features an article titled "Internet Makes Hypochondria Worse.")
There's a term for this: cyberchondria. Unsurprisingly, experts report that cyberchondria causes our work to suffer -- no doubt from our compulsion to keep clicking on health articles, fueled by our crushing anxiety that our rash is really a sign of a brain tumor. Truly, cyberchondria is the time-waster that just keeps on wasting.
Long gone are the days of the company doctor, but American Well is helping bring those days back -- virtually -- with telemedicine kiosks for the workplace.
The kiosks include basic medical equipment (allowing you to take your own blood pressure, for example), as well as a videoconferencing interface that enables you to remotely consult with a doctor who participates in your health plan's network. Additionally, American Well's kiosks -- being Internet of Things-enabled -- can be fully integrated with wearables such as those that use Apple's HealthKit. With this technology, employees are empowered to move beyond Internet guesswork and get real answers to their health concerns while at work.
Additionally, according to Catherine Anderson, a spokesperson for American Well, these office-deployed kiosks can help cut down on employee sick days and time off for doctor visits.
"Soooooo hungry," my friend Lauren (not her real name) texted me recently. Lauren is a corporate attorney at a large law firm. It was after 7 p.m., and she wasn't leaving the office anytime soon -- as usual.
Lauren keeps a snack drawer, but she always runs out of supplies and forgets to restock. This makes the company snack machine the closest available food source for Lauren. It's on a completely different floor from the one she works on -- hardly a realistic option for a hard-working, hungry employee struggling to focus while burning the candle at both ends. Beyond that, a diet of candy bars and potato chips doesn't make good brain food.
In the wake of the success of subscription services like Birchbox, the Internet is full of a variety of subscription snack options -- most of which are much healthier than office vending machine fare. NatureBox delivers a variety of "nutritionist-approved" snacks every month. Graze.com offers its own "nutritionist-approved" fare, weekly or bi-weekly. Nibblr, which focuses on portion control, lets you choose weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly delivery frequency.
Don't care for that "wholesome" stuff? Stick in a Box offers a "manlier" option: Monthly deliveries of beef jerky.
Between these and other options out there, you can probably find the right service to keep your snack drawer filled to your liking. Just don't forget to get up and take a walk every now and then.
Performance reviews are terrible. They frequently are badly constructed, result in huge amounts of paperwork and bureaucracy, and offer little -- if any -- actual employee improvement. About half of employees see them as a time sink.
Worse, they're not even accurate. Research indicates that, in the typical performance review process, about two-thirds of the employees who receive the highest scores are not, in fact, the organization's best performers.
Here, politics and budget can come into play. Cathy (not her real name), a manager at a large financial services firm, reports that she is often frustrated with her company's review process because of how intrinsically it is tied to raises and promotions. Consequently, she has an absolute ceiling on the number of high rankings she can give out.
Little surprise, then, that a small but steadily growing number of companies are now beginning to drop the annual performance review.
Rather than tell your employees how they're doing once a year, tell them how they're doing in real time -- measured against current and ongoing goals.
How? There's an app for that.
Actually, there are several mobile apps for that -- allowing employers and employees alike to track accomplishments and performance.
Some productivity apps, like Coach.me, explicitly rely on the involvement of others. As users identify their overall goals and weekly targets, others can chime in with encouragement and reminders while giving a sense of accountability.
There have been books written, a wide range of articles published, infographics, and plenty of comics about how terrible meetings are.
Pundits have suggestions for how to make meetings less torturous, but society remains in agreement that meetings are inherently time-killers. Varying statistics demonstrate that between 24% and 49% of employees view meetings as the workplace's biggest time-waster.
Fortunately, Enterprise 2.0 tools can come to the rescue, offering a variety of instant collaboration tools that run on SharePoint and other platforms.
Need a document or other company data? The power of the cloud is at your fingertips.
Need to find a subject-matter expert within your organization? Many collaboration tools offer rankings of employee expertise by democracy, such as employee endorsements, or through meritocracy, such as earning "badges" via gamification. Sitrion offers collaboration software that lets the company-client choose how employee expertise is ranked.
Need to actually talk to someone? Chat, voice-conferencing, and videoconferencing tools abound. You don't even need to leave your office. Suitable Technologies even makes motorized videoconferencing robots (for about $1,500 a pop) that you can remotely control, and make them roam around an office on the other side of the world.
Meetings? Meetings are for suckers.
Fortunately, Enterprise 2.0 tools can come to the rescue, offering a variety of instant collaboration tools that run on SharePoint and other platforms.
Need a document or other company data? The power of the cloud is at your fingertips.
Need to find a subject-matter expert within your organization? Many collaboration tools offer rankings of employee expertise by democracy, such as employee endorsements, or through meritocracy, such as earning "badges" via gamification. Sitrion offers collaboration software that lets the company-client choose how employee expertise is ranked.
Need to actually talk to someone? Chat, voice-conferencing, and videoconferencing tools abound. You don't even need to leave your office. Suitable Technologies even makes motorized videoconferencing robots (for about $1,500 a pop) that you can remotely control, and make them roam around an office on the other side of the world.
Meetings? Meetings are for suckers.
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