3 Ways to Help Employees Waste Time to Improve Productivity

It’s no shock that employees wasting time is a touchy subject at work. Whether you’re a salaried or hourly employee, it’s inevitable that employees waste time in some capacity at work.

Even so, employees want to keep their work distractions hidden from managers to save their image, and employers may very well like to believe their best employees are fully focused every shift, every day. As a leader in any business or team, it’s critical to acknowledge that while there are high and low achievers in every organization, productivity will never be at 100%.

So where do we go from here? It takes time and resources to fully understand how your employees spend their time, both working and not, but it’s worth the cost. While “wasted time” carries with it a negative connotation, not all time wasted at work is spent scrolling through TikTok.

Employees Waste Time for What Reasons?

Parents and caregivers, of which there are millions in the global workforce, have responsibilities outside of the workplace that often cannot wait until the close of business. While many of these employees are often the highest-producing employees, they may also be the most distracted.

Today’s business leaders and middle-level managers should be starting, and leading, the discussion around what can be done to help mitigate wasted time. Let’s dive into three steps that employers can take to help employees mitigate wasted time.

1. Understand Your Employee Population

No two companies are the same, and neither are their employees. Just because a productivity tool has landed on a top-10 ranking list doesn’t guarantee its capability to make an immediate, and positive, impact on your employees. While some business leaders may question the necessity for employee surveys, given their top-down view of the organization, it is a critical first step.

Understanding the makeup of your company is not the same as human capital resource planning. Rather than asking employees to complete a satisfaction survey around the existing healthcare plan, focus on exploratory questions. By setting clear expectations around the purpose of these surveys, you can ask tougher, more targeted, questions about how employees are spending their time at work, and what elements of their personal life they find hardest to keep out of the workplace.

With the right approach, you may even be able to source solutions from employees. Ask employees what apps or websites they use to help manage personal finances, scheduling, and tasks. From there, you may be able to find a business-facing equivalent that can help to remedy similar situations. But remember, it’s about gathering information, not hunting down the “worst” time managers.

2. Reshape Your Approach to Workplace Benefits

While 79% of employers expect to increase their benefits technology budget in the next three years, it will require more than just a shift in spending to truly make 2024 the year of technology-driven benefits.

Many services, from personal finance education to mental health counseling, are already offered online. Even as technology enables more benefits to be utilized in an online capacity, this shift needs to be more than just about digital accessibility. Not every benefit should be designed for use outside of the office.

A refreshed snack bar or artisanal coffee selection are nice perks to keep employees happy, but it’s time to consider what other tools can help your employees better themselves, even while they’re in the office. The next time benefits are discussed, consider asking your leadership team the following questions:

• Do we expect our employees to only utilize this benefit while they’re off the clock?
• How many of our current benefits can be used by employees while they’re online or in the office?
• Are there any tools that could help our employees to be more efficient, both while they’re at work and at home?
• Are there any benefits that can help employees who may need more targeted assistance? (This question can be around anything from long-distance commuters to employees who need help securing daycare for their children.)

3. Think Through the Business Lens

Across every industry, the popularization of generative AI has forced executives to sit down and contemplate where automation can make a difference in their business. While some may find answering this question easier than others, all should consider how business automation can help employees.

If your company is looking to onboard a finance tool that helps to capture and record receipts in a more efficient format, it’s worth considering if this technology is available in a consumer format. Understanding that automation around sales, email, chat, and many other business functions can be applied to the personal lives of employees will help you to determine where your biggest leaps in employee productivity can be achieved.

Workplace Culture is Changing

Workplace culture ebbs and flows, but today, its role in business success is growing. A new generation, Gen Z, is starting to enter the workplace in waves, and with this new generation comes new priorities. From sustainable business practices to employee benefits focused on financial and mental health, Gen Z’s workplace priorities will increasingly affect HR-related business priorities as enterprises look to attract and retain their next generation of top employees.

While businesses figure out how to navigate the workforce of tomorrow, today’s employees can benefit from some of these new priorities. A noticeable change in workplace culture always starts from the top. Speaking candidly with employees about the goals of the business is a nice way of showing you want to include everyone in the company’s success, but this is only half the equation.

To create a more connected workplace, you need to create an open environment that effectively encourages better time management and open communication around time management. This may often include criticism of the current systems or operating processes, but it will inevitably lead to conversations that help both employees and managers to understand where the company is winning, and where there may be gaps in benefits, time management, or communication that are leaving some of the potentially most impactful employees to struggle.

Understanding how your employees spend both their time working, and being distracted, gives you the whole picture as to who is truly productive and who may need to have more attention paid to their time in the office. By approaching the entire company through the eyes of how time is spent, you can better understand how those you perceive as high and low performers are actually contributing to the organization.

If your highest performing employees are also those who are spending the most time at work trying to manage their bills, taking care of an aging parent, or other external responsibilities, you may be able to help them become even more successful within the organization. Ultimately, the responsibility of starting this conversation lands at the top.