3 Things Your Employees are Doing at Work Instead of Working

September 23 2019 - Let's face it - not everyone is dedicated to their job, and with so many distractions with all the tech readily available in the workplace, it's no surprise that your employees might be slacking on the job. Read on to find out exactly what they’re doing that you may not even know about.

Social Media

Social media is a killer - it's common practice nowadays for people to constantly post updates on every aspect of their lives on the internet, and that goes for your employees, too. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and even dating sites like Tinder can take your employees' attention away from their work, whether that's on their mobile phone or a work computer. As well as posting updates, there's other things they may be getting up to - for example, Facebook Messenger for talking to friends or snapchat used for cheating. There's plenty of things they may be involved in, and social media is the easiest way to access a wide variety of distractions that will take your employees away from their job. So, how do you stop this? Well, blocking certain sites is always an idea, but the nature of your company (e.g. most likely, you use social media for marketing) may prohibit this. Setting parameters on how much time can be spent on the internet in a given day should prevent your employees from wasting time on social media.

Playing Games

For your employees, work can get tedious or boring if they're bogged down in paperwork, or maybe, they're just not into their work. The temptation to search online for online games can be too easy, and before you know it, your employees are spending their day playing games instead of doing their work. Even if they're not the type to get distracted for a long time, playing a game for 5 minutes in between jobs is something a lot of people tend to do, and although it sounds innocent enough, those minutes add up and can damage your workplace efficiency. To prevent this, blocking certain sites can be beneficial, and you don't have the issue with social media where some may need to be accessed - game sites should never be used in work, so it's much easier to block these sites. You can also set up a history of your employees search history and locate any sites related to gaming.

Sleeping

It sounds crazy, but sleeping at work is more common than you think - in fact, 70 percent of employees are sleep deprived. It's not unusual to see workers looking tired, and this is already a problem - never mind when employees start nodding off or sleeping at their disks. Your approach to sleep-deprived employees should be a little unconventional. Perhaps offer them a time to nap, even going to lengths as to dedicate a room to napping with blankets and cushions! In their break time, of course, this can be a great way of refreshing your employees and preventing their sleep from affecting their work.

These are the main three time wasters you need to be aware of if you want to optimize your workplace efficiency.

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