Are you at work right now? Has opening this web page distracted you from a project? If so, you’re like most people: they’re spending more time at the office, but they’re distracted for a good chunk of their workday. While some of those distractions are emails, meetings, phone calls and social media, a lot of other distractions can’t be helped – like unproductive hours that are a result of overloaded brains. To try and catch up, people take work home, or tackle emails outside of work hours.

An Ernst & Young report found that employees are unproductive for around four hours per week, which doesn’t sound like much until you do the math: that could equal 11% of annual salary costs. The report also found that nearly a third of respondents took work home because they were less distracted there.

How you can make sure staff are more productive, less stressed, and less distracted

• Be flexible with flexibility

In Australia and New Zealand, flexible work conditions is the number one driver for personal satisfaction in the workplace. People are already willingly spending more hours in the office – if they were given ‘permission’ to have a flexible schedule, perhaps stress would lessen (therefore decreasing their unproductive hours)?

• Step away from the inbox!

We’re all guilty of it – that little envelope icon pops up and we drop whatever we’re doing. Try to limit access to email throughout the workday and check it just once every few hours. Even removing the notification sounds could have a huge impact, especially if your company has a high email volume.

• Consider task management tools

There are a slew of tools and software packages that can break bigger projects down into smaller, manageable tasks, and empower people to set realistic deadlines – meaning time is more effectively managed and stress is reduced.

Office 365 products

Microsoft Office 365 offers productivity tools to help you manage projects and tasks. Even better – if you have an Office 365 email service you’ll likely have most of these tools already included in your subscription. Not sure where to start with Office 365? No worries – our team specialises in Office 365 products.

What’s next?

Talk to us – our productivity consulting service could be just what you need to reclaim some of those lost hours.