Case in point: constantly fielding email has the same deleterious effect on performance as missing an entire night’s sleep. In addition to negatively impacting employees emotionally, businesses are also negatively impacted since even the briefest interruption can double a worker’s error rate.Ī growing body of research is showing that workplace distractions even degrade employee IQ scores. The previously cited Udemy survey revealed 34 percent of employees like their jobs less when in a distracting workplace.Īnother study done by University of California at Irvine showed that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, and then experience more stress, pressure and higher levels of frustration.

Distractions lead to productivity loss, which leads to a longer workday, which leads to frustration and stress, which leads to a lack of engagement and motivation and eventually attrition. The distracted workplace contributes to a vicious cycle ending in employee dissatisfaction. Incredibly, upward of 40 percent of an employee’s actual workday is spent on non-productive efforts, costing companies millions in lost productivity. Given the significant investment organizations make in the workforce, reallocating employee efforts to focus on meaningful work and devising strategies to diffuse the distracted workplace is quintessential.ĭistracted Workplace = Disastrous Outcomes To this end, employers must provide an employee experience that facilitates focused work emphasizing attention management. Today, corporate success hinges on intellectual capability, and productivity is dependent on cultivating employee cognition - helping facilitate employees’ ability to synthesize information, to create and to innovate. While the move from a manufacturing economy to the knowledge economy has been well-documented and well understood, approaches to improving productivity in the knowledge economy have some catching up to do. Recent studies show the situation is only growing worse. The same survey found the average employee lost 31 hours a month in meetings and was disrupted around 56 times a day, taking two hours daily to recover from these disruptions. As organizations place an ever-increasing focus on adopting new technologies to aid collaboration toward a more responsive, real-time business, we’re now on full-tilt communication overload.Ī few years ago, research showed the average employee received 304 business-related emails weekly, took around 16 minutes to refocus attention after handling incoming email and checked email 36 times an hour. According to a survey conducted by Udemy Research - aptly named “ 2018 Workplace Distraction Report” - nearly 3 out of 4 workers (70 percent) say they feel distracted at work.

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