Australia ranked number 2 in the world with employees losing 600 hours per year to a lack of focus, just behind France at 608 hours.
Workplace distractions are costing employers thousands of hours in lost productivity.
In today’s hyperconnected world, maintaining focus on work-related tasks has become increasingly challenging. With colleagues, meetings and messages competing for our attention, resulting in huge amounts of time lost not focused on the key measures of success.
The most common distractions leading to lost focus are work-related chat messages (166 hours), personal activities (146 hours) and work-related emails (82 hours).
If you add to this the number of hours employees spend in unproductive meetings, the number only gets worse.
Distractions have become an inescapable part of our working lives.
Not all distractions are inevitable or equal. While we can’t eliminate every distraction, we can embrace new ways of working to bring order to the chaos.
Most people can relate to the difficulty of refocusing on the task at hand after pausing to check a message or attend an unrelated meeting.
Research found that, in the midst of these distractions, Australians spend an average of 131 hours annually trying to regain their focus.
Only forty-two per cent of workers said they rarely spent more than an hour on productive work without interruption.
The global survey also revealed that managers lose focus more frequently than other positions (683 hours per year compared to 553 hours for general staff).
It is our responsibility to understand our natural tendencies and identify how, when, and where we do our best work with the fewest distractions.
While work-related communications are a significant cause of lost focus for employees, one potential concern for employers is that cutting down on communication may impede collaboration and teamwork.
The key is to strike a balance and ensure all communication and meetings have a clear productive outcome and the message is successfully delivered in an efficient manner.
Ultimately it is us that decides if we get distracted or not and therefore it is us that needs to set a routine to improve our productivity, leave work on time, and spend quality time with our family and friends.
If you or your workplace need support in this area, please feel free to reach out to us and we can discuss in more detail.
