In the highly competitive business world, gaining higher levels of productivity is long-cherished by everyone. However, in a bid to go above and beyond the goals that companies set for their employees, workers often face many obstacles and distractions that keep them from achieving their goals. 

To make matters worse, most employers fail to identify what real productivity killers are. Fortunately, today a lot of research has been conducted on this topic. Here we have highlighted some major productivity killers in the workspace. This will help businesses make some rapid and real changes to boost employee productivity.  

So, without any further delays, check out the top efficiency destroyers: 

Bouncing Between Too Many Apps

To conquer the speed and complexity of modern work, organizations are rapidly adopting numerous applications and technologies to stimulate the innovative capabilities of the workforce. A study by Mavenlink found that the sudden influx of apps designed to improve productivity at work actually had an opposite effect. 

In the quest to make things easier and propel business, companies end up finding themselves in haywire—a chaotic map of disconnected systems and apps. This creates a slew of problems, lack of transparency, lack of visibility across apps, increased workload, data accuracy and reliability issues, and potential revenue loss.  

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According to a study, 73 percent of the organizations spend over an hour on average navigating from app to app daily. Meaning, if you have 100 billable resources on a team that cost you about $150 an hour, your business is losing $15,000 in potential revenue every day. The same study divulged that 72 percent avowed that companies aren’t using reliable data.   

• Important Data Scattered Everywhere

With conversations, documents, and project management spread across different electronic cubbies, vital information is scattered everywhere and a hassle to find. As a result, when you need to find a particular document or information, you have to check every platform that you are working on. 

Though some of the tools claim to make things easier for users, in reality, they aren’t so easy-to-use, especially when you need them to do something else.     

• Too Many Meetings at Work

Minutes fly away when your day is packed with meetings. But scheduling too many meetings can suffocate productivity and morale, especially when an organization has many demands on an employee’s time. Of course, having a well-planned meeting is the best way out, but the productivity gets squeezed when your organization is plagued by too many meetings that don’t add up to anything.   

Sure, you need to stay abreast of the progress, but this doesn’t give you the right to waste your employees’ time and cost the organization unnecessarily. Trimming the fat off your official meetings’ length is certainly a good start, but you also need to ensure your employees won’t feel that they should be sitting at their desks and doing the actual work rather sitting in a meeting. 

This requires you to have something that brings everyone together, so nobody misses anything. Something that’ll improve communication flow and enable employees to deliver more work. A system that everyone can use without having to show them how.   

• Continuous Emails and Texts 

In the hyper-connected business world, we use email and texts for everything related to communication and collaboration. Resultantly, many employees waste their time on internal messages and emails. Checking every email and text can be a huge distraction, especially when collaborating with more than one team. Nonstop emails and texts will keep you handcuffed to your desktop or mobile. This keeps you from prioritizing the essential tasks, and you end up missing the deadlines.      

Rather evading emails and texts from work or setting up some bizarre rules, its best to leverage a solution that connects everyone in the company and allows them to share information at the right time with the right people. Not only will this keep every single employee in the loop, but also keep them on track to achieve their goals. 

• Lack of Recognition at Work

To have an organizational structure that is designed for productivity, it’s essential to make the manpower feel appreciated. Lack of recognition at work can drastically reduce output, performance, and proceeds. Worst of all, it negatively affects morale and makes the work environment toxic. Employees who aren’t valued at work are more likely to quit within the next year. 

So how often do you recognize your workforce?

When was the last time you gave someone a shout-out during a company-wide meeting? 

How about handing out a congratulatory bonus? 

Or did you create a culture of Kudos? 

If you are nodding in disagreement, then it’s time to ramp up your recognition efforts. Remember, employees who are recognized at work are more enthusiastic, engaged, and productive about their role and the company’s success. So make sure to appreciate your employees’ efforts by clearly segregating positive feedback from developmental feedback.   

• Doing too Much Admin Hurt Managers 

Long before the advent of the internet, monitoring employees’ activities and moments were way too easy. That’s because all they could do was doodle on pictures, read some magazines, or take constant breaks in between chores to smoke. But in this day and age, employees are usually found wasting time online. And, every minute they waste is like pouring money down the drain. Granting the fact that you want to make sure your staff members have their breaks, you also need to ensure they aren’t wasting time on social media, online games, or surfing the internet. Else, it would affect their productiveness.  

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A research by Salary.com found that that 29 percent of the employees spend about two hours a week on non-work-related surfing. And to your surprise, 21 percent of staff members do this for about five hours a week. This alludes that they waste about somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour on this activity.  

While your managers can help you get rid of this problem, doing too much admin can negatively affect their performance. When they spend too much time and energy monitoring, reporting, and doing trivial tasks, it will take their focus away from the chore responsibilities. So, what started as a favor to the company might end up hurting your managers.

To alleviate the burden off their shoulders and allow them to focus on what they do best, use an all-in-one solution that actively tracks your employees’ activities and bar them from wasting time or taking too many breaks.