You may be surprised to learn two big causes of distractions at work. These are the distractions that force leaders to stop what they’re doing and answer a question or provide guidance.
On their own, no one distraction is a productivity killer. And the employees who are behind them are not bad people.
But when you add up the time of all these distractions, it becomes easy to understand why you’re working late every day and working on weekends. That’s the cost of these interruptions and they will impact your work-life balance.
The good news is the two big causes of distractions at work are in your control and some actionable adjustments can reduce or solve the problem.
A Lack of Training
While your employees are good at their jobs, they have some professional blind spots, where they don’t know what to do. This boils down to a lack of training.
This training gap is often seen in businesses that are growing quickly, are struggling, or have a lot of turnover. Basically, most businesses!
It’s very likely that you mean to get around to this training at some point but can never find the time. Everyone is too busy with the present to think of the future That’s a big problem because it ensures that you’ll have people constantly coming to you, looking for answers.
Invest the time to make sure employees and especially new ones, know what to do. Put some dates on the calendar, so it becomes harder to move these sessions down the road.
You may also want to review policies and capture them in a manual or computer file. Make sure these resources are kept up to date and can be easily found.
If you don’t have time to conduct training, then outsource it. It will cost you more but it will get done.
Too Much Control
Do people come to you with questions, not because they don’t know what to do, but because you’ve created a workplace culture where people don’t feel they can make a decision without your blessing?
It’s good to have things done your way, which I’m sure is the right way. And you do need to make sure that people don’t go off your path of proven policies and procedures and do their own thing.
But if you are to maximize your productive time, you also have to have trust in your leadership style. You can’t touch every action and every decision that happens in your business. It’s exhausting and time consuming.
Instead, make sure people know what to do and why you need them to do things a certain way. Then you let them execute, following your well defined standards.
Later, you can judge them on their results and hold them accountable if things didn’t turn out as well as expected.
Final Thought
Treat your productive time like a priceless resource. You spend it every day. Invest wisely.
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