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Distracted

Do you know that the attention of your employees are diverted for more than 2 hours each day? Actually, 2 hours is the average. Most often than not, the culprits of this is technology - e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, IMs, mobile phones and others. They are not the sole culprits though. As a matter of fact, technology is beneficial to your company as well. We're not telling you to let your workers off the hook but we're telling you that you can't really take technology away from them.

Conversational Distractions

Since technology plays a little part of the two-hour distraction we mentioned above, what about the rest? Actually, it is conversations that get them sidetracked the most. Either it's chatting with co-workers, sharing gossips, people who talk too loud - they're all getting them sidetracked. However, it's hard for you to cut off these conversations, more so their conflicts. Furthermore, most employees engage in quite a bit of their own distraction, but they are also victims to co-worker chatter even when they don't want to be. It's no wonder that there are employees who request for solo work time. This way, they can be free of the noise and concentrate on working alone. Not only are these requests reasonable, they're pretty much a win-win solution for you.

How can they have distraction-free solo work time?

What some companies do is they offer their conference rooms and mandate that employees turn their gadgets to silent mode or completely shut off. In addition to corporate mandates, sound masking has risen as a viable option for noise reduction in general. Like its name suggests, sound masking is white noise through office speakers in the ceiling tiles that is low-level but just structured enough to cover, or mask, unwanted, intrusive noise. Sound masked offices have proven beneficial to employees as they have increased their productivity and efficiency.