Salary.com’s survey revealed that 64 percent of employees distract themselves from work by browsing through non-work related websites every day at work. The survey had more than 3,200 respondents. Of those who admitted to browsing through non-work related sites, 39 percent said they spend only one hour or less per week doing that, 29 percent spend 2 hours per week, 21 percent goes to five hours per week, and 3 percent admitted to doing it for more than 10 hours or more.
It’s the usual culprit. Facebook remains the number one destination at 41 percent, followed by LinkedIn at 37 percent. The even more painful part is that they visit LinkedIn to look for other work. That means you are paying them so they can look for another job. Those with higher education are worse offenders with 67 percent of those with PhDs admitting to wasting time and 65 percent for those with master’s degrees .
Even without the statistics, most employers would most likely already know this phenomenon. The more important question is how do employers go around the problem?
There is no lack of suggestions on how to deal with the problem but most of the solutions simply present a counter, and maybe even bigger, problem. In other cases, the solution seems good but there is no tool to implement it.
There are platforms designed to require each employee to log what they do but it does not consider the necessary distraction and urgent tasks that employees might not be able to log. There are tools that act like a “Big Brother” by monitoring computer screens but it does not consider offline tasks. There are others who suggest that employees simply need to be challenged and motivated but that will only mean hiring another human resource person to craft and implement employee motivation program.
sem.PROJECT TIMER provides an easy solution to these problems whether it’s a company of 10 or 10,000.
sem.PROJECT TIMER allows you to:
• Provide employees with the freedom to work in their own phase without having to pay for all the times they get distracted or get of course
• Plan workloads of each employee to ensure they get enough time on each project or task
• Get an accurate assessment of how much contribution an employee makes on each project or department
• Know exactly the tasks under each activity and each activity under each department or project
Monitoring and Freedom
sem.PROJECT TIMER allows employees or team members to log in the time they will or already spent on a certain project or task. Administrators, whether that’s the immediate supervisor or Human Resource Person, can approve the time being allotted to the task or disapprove it.
This process makes the work result-oriented rather than time-oriented. An employee can request three hours to do a financial analysis of their new production process. It allows the company to directly allocate the time an employee is getting paid to a specific task. It also allows the company to see how many people are working on a certain project and assess if there’s too many or if there are redundancies.
However, the monitoring is not so intrusive as to demoralize the employee. If the employee chooses to take a 15 minute break every 30 minutes to do other task or have a cup of coffee, they may do so but the employer doesn’t have to take the burden of that. You pay for three hours to get a work done, whatever happens in between is not your concern.
Pay for the Work Done
Many companies acknowledge the problem of digital distraction. In fact, 54% of companies in the US banned Facebook and other social networks in their office . However, Angelo Kinicki, professor of management at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, stated that it might actually be counter-productive because people aren’t wired to do 8 hours of work without interruptions .
The issue, however, is how to draw the line. Interruptions and distractions cost more than the actual hours being spent on other things. Employees need time to get back on track and some may actually abuse the privilege.
sem.PROJECT TIMER solves this by focusing on the result and not on the process. If 20 hours is allotted to finish a task, that’s what the company is going to pay for and the employee may do the work in which every manner he or she finds more productive. sem.PROJECT TIMER is all about results and according to Firms of Endearment by Raj Sisodia, results-driven companies provided returns of 1,646% between 1996 and 2011 .
Planning and Assessment
Peter Bregman pounded on the importance of ruthless planning . Bregman studied how a day’s productivity can suffer when emails get read before the day’s work is planned. Urgent matters pop up, concerns are forwarded and opportunities seem too big to miss are attended. As a result, existing projects suffer.
sem.PROJECT TIMER allows companies to take a strategic step back and set the priorities. Based on employee time allotment, companies know what realistically may be done. Even before projects begin or on a regular basis, sem.PROJECT TIMER will give you an accurate report on who is supposed to be doing what.
It allows you to do that without having to micro-manage because your focus is in the bigger picture, not the detail. You will be able to gauge when a department is undermanned or a project has redundancies. Delays will be prevented and every person will be maximized.
More importantly, sem.PROJECT TIMER actually grants your employees power by being accountable with their time and outputs. If you choose to have different approval levels, supervisors or managers learn to be accountable to their subordinates’ productivity.
In the end, sem.PROJECT TIMER helps you:
• maximize the time of each employee and the money you pay them
• make everything that everyone does becomes transparent without stripping them of their independence
• be realistically ruthless when it comes to productivity
