Cyclope-Series Team Blog

We have been writing lately about employees’ non-work related activities which cost company money due to reduced employee productivity. We have seen interesting results of studies about employees wasting time at work and we have also analyzed the reasons employee waste precious work time.

Studies revealed that significant work time is wasted for non-work related activities, but, the next question that came into my mind is: what about the remaining time? Do the employees use it properly? Well, it seems that many employees are not as productive as they should be. Even if the remaining work time is supposed to be used as efficiently as possible, unfortunately this does not happen. A survey conducted by Salary.com revealed that the majority of respondents - 75% - feel that some office related activities cut into productive time at work. Let’s take a closer look at the top 5 work-related distracters:

1 – Fixing someone else’s work (chosen by 54% of respondents) seems to be the first reason for productivity loses in the office. We all know that fixing a thing somebody else has broken, usually takes longer than doing that thing from the beginning.
2 – Dealing with office politics (47%) is the second work related activity that makes employees less productive.
3 - Waiting for a co-worker to finish something you need (42%) – this is an issue companies face because of the irresponsibility of team members that do not understand team work.
4 - Attending work-related meetings or events (42%) – it seems that many employees do not understand the importance and the scope of meetings and consider them useless and wasting time activities.
5 - Administrative work (33%)

Comparing the results of this year survey with the last year’s one we will notice that the top two distracters this year are the same as last years’, while sending or responding to work-related e-mails was knocked off the list this year by attending work related meetings or events.

In the end, it is all about managers. It is up to them to determine their employees to stop wasting time on non-work related activities, but, through their management style they are also responsible for the way employees use the remaining work time.

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