Productivity can be significantly improved if you are able to automate tasks that typically stymie progress. Find out more about it by visiting our blog.
Continue readingGet More Done By Automating Parts of Your Business
Productivity in the Age of Distraction
Let’s face it, we live distracted lives. More people than ever have difficulty focusing on tasks due to the prevalence of continuous distractions. Whether the distractions are self-inflicted or not,workers today have to develop a strategy to ensure they are able to be as productive as they need to be.
Today, we’ll look at some of the biggest distractions for employees in the workplace, and how people stay productive.
The Reality
Everything about the modern workplace is continually changing. These shifts throw off a great many people. Since the way we work and the manner in which we carry ourselves has changed a lot recently,new strategies have to be considered to keep the myriad of distractions from affecting our productivity.
If we were to take a look at some of the most wasteful problems, we first have to look at the things that employers are doing that are exacerbating their employees’ tendency to let their minds wander. The major problem for many employees is that today’s businesses have largely started utilizing an open office method.
This strategy is utilized both to reduce overhead costs associated with housing a business as well as to boost employee collaboration. Surprisingly, this strategy often has the opposite effect. Employees are often found complaining about the constant distractions that come with the open office. This results in them feeling stressed out and unmotivated, leading to bad feeling about their jobs, and more importantly,themselves.
One question to be asked is: does this happen because they haven’t been properly trained to thrive in a bustling workplace?According to a poll conducted by Udemy, 66 percent of responders say so. If your staff is constantly dealing with distractions that sap their ability to be productive, a good strategy would be to try and ascertain what exactly the underlying problems are and attempt to find solutions.
Some say it’s the constant noise, some suggest it’s the proximity to other people, but the most popular answer is that companies are utilizing too much technology that they don’t have a grasp on. Ironic that the systems that businesses put in place to keep operations working efficiently are a large part of why most unproductive workers are falling off the pace.
Staying Social
Even the people that can get over working directly alongside other people, are finding that there are more opportunities to be distracted. With around-the-clock access to their social accounts, many people take advantage of the business’ Wi-Fi for access.
Even if the business has been proactive and has put in a content filter and a comprehensive mobile device management platform that is piggybacked with a thorough Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy, limiting a user’s ability to access social media may actually backfire on you.
Unfortunately, some employees don’t appreciate that you are trying to protect the network they depend on from outside threats, and only look on this strategy as something that is put in place to keep them from distracting themselves. Advocates for social media all cite the importance of it for marketing purposes, but if someone is compulsively checking how many likes their latest selfie got it is almost assuredly cutting into their ability to be productive.
Distracted Staff
People tend to overestimate their ability to recover from interruptions, even if they are minute. Most people take upwards of a half hour to return to focus after they have dealt with an interruption, more if the interruption happens midday. Post-lunchtime lulls in productivity are normal, but avoiding becoming so distracted that productivity effectively stops can be a major problem for businesses.
One problem that comes from major breaks in focus is that employees tend to try and compensate. They feel more pressure to produce, so they’ll work faster, building frustration and the stress that comes with it. A stressed-out worker is naturally less productive than one that is calm and collected.
In fact, it cuts even deeper. It’s shown that while people don’t appreciate being distracted when they are trying to be productive, it has a very negative effect on employee morale. According to Udemy, 34 percent of workers like their jobs less if they are constantly distracted, while 22 percent believe that pervasive distractions keep them from regular professional advancement.
One place that most employees consider a distraction is the meeting. Meetings are necessary, of course, but since many meetings tend to run long because they themselves get inundated by distractions, it can leave the staff of a company frustrated, or with not enough time to actually get something noteworthy accomplished.
Strategies for Improvement
One of the best ways for any organization to foster a culture of productivity is to create what is known as a learning culture. To do this, regular training can be provided that is aimed to get people prepared to deal with the would-be distractions that they’ll find day-in and day-out inside a business.
This could just be as simple as identifying possible distractions and giving people some tips on how to get over them. Some examples include:
- Too much noise – If there is just too much noise going on in your office, put on headphones. Whether you are listening to anything or not, people distract people wearing headphones less than if they aren’t wearing headphones.
- Smartphone access – One of he biggest distractions is the little computer that fits in your pocket. It’s because it is configured to your life, so even if it is completely streamlined, it is still a distraction from productivity. Turn off the notifications when you can,or leave your phone someplace where it isn’t in your eye line. You know what they say, out of sight, out of mind.
- Co-worker interactions – Much of the time it’s fine for your contemporaries to engage you in chit-chat, but when you are trying to be productive and you get interrupted, it can be very frustrating. The best remedy for this is to send very strong signals to get them to understand you’re not interested in conversing at that moment.
- Hunger – By midday most people absolutely need to eat. If you are in the zone and hunger comes knocking your best bet is to go ahead and eat and hope to get back at it quickly.
There are literally dozens of reasons for why you get distracted, but if you can return to focus quickly, more will get done. If you want to talk to one of our business professionals about how to utilize IT to keep your productivity up, call WheelHouse IT’s technicians at (877) 771-2384.
Tip of the Week: Prioritizing Tasks for Better Productivity
Prioritizing tasks is one of the hardest parts of being a business owner. Countless tasks will pile up every hour of the day,and you might be lost trying to figure out how to proceed. Thankfully, you have us to offer you some strategies to approach your workday and be more productive with your time. Let’s get started!
Eliminate Non-Starters
It stands to reason that if you can’t work on one particular task, then it shouldn’t even be on the docket. You should betaking steps to address tasks that can be completed. This keeps tasks from piling up and progress at an all-time high. Once you’ve determined which tasks can be removed from your to-do list, either because it’s not time to work on them, or you don’t have the resources to actually complete them at this time,you can remove them from your list with the intention of following up on them at a later date.
Rank Your Tasks by Importance and Urgency
Some tasks you might put off simply because you don’t want to do them, or they don’t need to be done this instant. While this might seem like procrastination, it’s reasonable to take into account the urgency of the task, as not everything is important. After all, if every task is a priority, then none of them are the priority. For the tasks with an important time frame, just resist the urge to push it back as hard as you can. This will help keep you from missing a deadline.
Determine a Task’s Value
If an item will deliver the greatest benefit to your business as a whole, then perhaps it’s important to think about it with greater urgency. This is particularly the case for client or customer satisfaction. On the other hand, you need to consider tasks that will have a major fallout if they aren’t completed on-time. If you can compare each of these and weigh their importance, you can make sure that all important tasks are accomplished when they need to be.
What Does the Boss Want?
If the higher-ups in your organization set something as a priority, chances are you should consider it a priority as well.They want things done in a certain way, so it’s your responsibility to assist them with it in any way you can. However, their word isn’t the end-all-be-all. If you see something that could be improved or a process that could benefit your organization, at least bring it up. You have nothing to lose. If the decision benefits the consumer, then there is a greater chance of the decision pushing past the executive level.
What Are You Ready to Do?
You’re not a machine; you’re a human, and as a human you can only accomplish so much on any given day. Remember your limits and try to adopt a workflow that lets you get as much done as you can without going over your limits. It’s also critical that you keep in mind some tasks will inevitably crop up and throw a wrench in your productivity, so be prepared to adjust your workday’s tasks according to priority. Start with what you’re ready to accomplish and go from there.
WheelHouse IT can equip your business with technology designed to help you be more productive. To learn more, reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.
Can You Identify Productivity Issues?
High degrees of productivity can be difficult to achieve for a lot of organizations, and this is primarily due to everyone’s least favorite part of the workplace: rampant distractions.
Your business’ productivity can suffer from even the most unlikely reasons. We’ll help you address them so you can minimize distractions in the workplace.
Environmental Issues
The first productivity issue in your workplace could potentially be the office itself. Even something as simple as the type of lighting (and its quantity) can affect productivity, for better or worse.
If your office is dark or dim, it can create sensations of sluggishness in your employees, convincing them that maybe it’s okay to not give it their all and relax a little bit. In particular, the influence of Daylight Savings Time can have a major impact on your workers, as it has been shown to affect workers for up to three weeks.
Adjusting the lighting of your office can remediate this issue considerably. Light is measured in Kelvin temperature (K), and if you adjust your office’s light accordingly, you can create the desired effect in your workers.
For example, a warm glow of a fire would be measured at 2,000K, and an overcast winter’s day would be about 7,000K. Of course, neither of these make for a particularly productive day, so you can aim for somewhere in the 5,000K to 5,500K mark–about the level of a lovely sunny day.
Other senses can also play a major role in your employees’ productivity. Take, for example, sound. Everyone is going to perceive their ideal working conditions differently. If an employee needs silence to work as hard as they can, they will be vulnerable to countless distractions that the workplace inevitably creates.
Taking these employees into account, it can’t hurt to consider creating a quiet area for your workers to use when they really need to hunker down and get work done with minimal distraction. As for the other workers, you can give them the opportunity to work with their preferred noise level by giving them some noise-canceling headphones.
Burnout
No one can work at 100% productivity for as long as your business would like them to. People aren’t machines–they can’t work as hard as possible for long periods of time without bringing user error and frustration into the mix.
To keep this kind of burnout from ruling the roost in your workplace, it’s important to foster engagement for your employees. If you can promote a positive environment, including wellness and personal well-being, you might be surprised by how much you can improve your employees’ motivation and willingness to work harder.
It’s also critical to keep in mind that your employees don’t live so they can work for you. The truth of the matter is that even the best, most loyal employees are working for you so they can live. Therefore, you should avoid encroaching on their personal time as often as possible.
If you have no choice but to ask them to come in on their days off, consider compensating them generously for their additional work. You can also make their lives easier when they are in the office by implementing automation solutions for the more menial tasks. This allows your workers to focus instead on tasks that have more substance to them.
Managerial Shortcomings
You should also consider the possibility that your business is losing productivity due to managerial shortcomings from your higher-ups. If you look at your business’ management style with an external perspective, what would you see?
Would it be a place that trains employees properly? Do you provide helpful feedback and have realistic work expectations? If you fail any aspect of this, there’s a very real chance that your employees aren’t the ones at fault here–you are.
Thankfully, this is easy enough to fix. All it takes is a bit of solid communication with your employees. Make sure that they are always welcome to discuss any potential issues they might have with your management style.
This can also help you make sure that you’re providing enough guidance for particular tasks. It’s important to remember that you might be the leader, but you’re all on the same team–be sure they know this.
Poor Technology Practices
One of the easiest ways to make sure your employees get the least amount of work done is to give them technology solutions that simply don’t work for them.
After all, employees are only as effective as the tools they use. If you want your employees to be as productive as possible, you need to make sure they have the equipment needed to do their jobs.
WheelHouse IT can help your business get the most out of its technology, and by extension, your employees. To learn more, reach out to us at (877) 771-2384.
Tip of the Week: Outlook 2016 Can Do More than You Think
Email is one of the most common productivity tools in any office. It can also be one of the easiest to become disorganized. However, users of Microsoft Outlook 2016 will find that the program provides plenty of useful tools to ensure that your communications don’t get out of hand.
For this week’s tip, we’ll explore some of them.
Search Folders
Many of us get a veritable ton of emails, and we just can’t get to all of our messages at once. That being said, there are likely many that we also just can’t miss. Outlook 2016 offers a way to help make sure that emails that you don’t have time for at the moment aren’t forgotten later in its Search Folder function.
These Search Folders are effectively an easy way to automate the organization of your inbox. You can have your conversations with specific people, or mail that you’ve flagged to follow up on, or even messages that contain specific words filtered out automatically into its own folder.
There are also options to customize your search folder even more, by customizing the criteria on an even more specific level. All you have to do is right-click on Search Folders in the side pane, and select New Search Folder. Then you just select the options you want, and any message that meets that criteria will automatically appear in the folder, ready to be attended to and removed.
Peeks
In the bottom-left corner of your Outlook window, you should see five small icons. These icons are called Peeks, and prevent you from having to flip between applications to keep yourself managed.
The first is your mailbox, the place you’re used to seeing when you open Outlook. The others allow you to give your incoming messages more utility. For instance, the rest connect your mail to your Microsoft Calendar, your Contacts, and a To-Do List of your Tasks.
These functions would be greatly useful on their own, but Outlook takes them one step further. Let’s say you’ve received an email from a new sender. By dragging an email over to the People icon, you can generate most of a contact, complete with the message they sent you for reference. By dragging an actionable email to your Task button, you can create an event, and even set a date by typing something like, “17 days from next Monday,” and it will calculate it for you.
These new tasks can all be seen in the View tab, and by clicking Daily Task List and selecting Normal, you can see them as part of your calendar, and adjust them as needed.
Delete Unneeded Addresses from Auto-Complete
Auto-Complete is a great way to save time…until, that is, the email address you’re actually looking for is buried underneath a ton that you just don’t need anymore. Deleting names from this list is easy: just start typing a nameto pull the list up, and click the ‘X’ on the right to remove the name.
If you should ever reach the point where you want to be rid of Auto-Complete, you have a few options. By navigating to File > Options > Mail and the Send messages section, you can either wipe the list by clicking Empty Auto-Complete, or simply disable it by un-checking Use Auto-Complete.
Email has always been a great business productivity tool, and it only gets better as technology improves.
Are there any ways that you use Outlook’s capabilities to keep yourself organized? Share them in the comments, and make sure you subscribe to our blog!