How much time do employees at your workplace spend on Facebook or reddit? Does this increase or decrease productivity? These are questions that rankle every employer. This is because helping employees distract themselves once in a while can help improve the culture at your workplace. At the same, spending too much time on Facebook or Instagram could mean less time available to get real work done.
Social Media At Work
It is no secret that employees like to spend time surfing the internet, especially social media, at work. One survey published by Pew Internet in 2016 found that nearly a third of the employees used social media to “take a mental break” from work. But a good number of employees also had other valid reasons to use social media at work.
34% – To take a mental break
27% – To connect with friends and family
24% – Make or support professional connections
20% – Get information that helps solve problems at work
17% – Build or strengthen personal connections with coworkers
17% – Learn about someone they work with
12% – Ask work related questions of people outside the organization
12% – Ask work related questions of people inside the organization
This figure is not uniform across organizations. Workplaces where strict social media policies are in place see more people using social media merely for work-related purposes compared to other workplaces.
Does Social Media Improve Job Performance?
It seems kind of antithetical to ask employees who use social media if that improves their job performance. Of course, they are going to say it helps. But here goes the survey results from Pew:
78% – People who use social media for work related purposes say it’s helpful to build connections or finding new opportunities
71% – People say it helps them keep in touch with their connections in their field
56% – People who connect with experts using social media
51% – People who like to connect with coworkers on a personal basis
46% – People who find information they need to do their job on social media
Time Spent In Meetings
Ever heard of Parkinson’s law of time management? It states that work expands to fill the time available. There is no better example of this than workplace meetings. Office meetings seldom start on time, and are rarely ever focused just on the agenda. This is because most meetings are scheduled in chunks of 30 minutes or an hour. So even if it means that you needed nothing more than ten minutes to discuss the agenda, the meeting is most likely to take thirty minutes because that’s the time each participant has blocked.
There are not a lot of recent studies to measure the productivity of time spent in meetings. One study published by researchers at the University of North Carolina from back in 2007 found that the length and frequency of meetings have increased in the past fifty years.
1960 – the average executive spent 10 hours a week in meetings
2007 – the average executive spent 23 hours a week in meetings
The increase in time spent eats into other tasks that an executive has to fulfil. Another UNC survey of over 182 senior managers found the following:
65% felt that meetings kept them from completing their own tasks
71% felt that meetings are unproductive and inefficient
64% felt that meetings compromised their need for ‘deep thinking’
62% felt that meetings fail to bring the team closer
It is worth pointing out that these statistics may not be universally true. Another study published in 2012 by the Center for Economics and Business Research found that the average time spent on meetings in a week was 4 hours.
Salary.com published a survey in 2011 where participants said that ‘too many meetings‘ was the number 1 time waster at work. That’s up from #3 in 2008.
Another survey from Office Team found that nearly 45% of senior executives felt that their productivity would improve if meetings were banned once per week.
Employee Productivity
According to a 2017 report published by US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), overall productivity in the last quarter of 2017 grew by 1.1 percent. This was calculated as the average output per hour of labor. There was a 3.2 percent growth in output with a 2.1 percent increase in hours worked during this time period.
Productivity depends to a great deal on how engaged employees feel at work. According to a Gallup survey, this is seen to correlate with how long an employee has stayed on at a company. Those employees who have been with a company for less than a year are the most engaged while those who have spend nearly a decade are the least engaged.
Actively Engaged at Work
37% engaged among employees with less than 1 year of tenure
33% engaged among employees who are 1-3 years in a company
34% engaged among employees who are 3-10 years in a company
27% engaged among employees who have stayed for more than 10 years.
Actively Disengaged at Work
18% actively disengaged among employees with less than 1 year tenure
17% actively disengaged among employees who are 1-3 years in a company
18% actively disengaged among employees who are 3-10 years in a company
21% actively disengaged among employees who have stayed for more than 10 years.
How To Get The Highest Performance From Employees
The Gallup survey suggests that the highest performance comes from employees who meet the trifecta of Talent, Engagement and Tenure (TET)
05% – This is the percentage of employees who meet this trifecta and are thus offer the highest performance
18% – This is the average performance increase among the top 5% compared to the average employee
35% – This is the average performance increase among the top 5% compared to employees who do not meet any of the three TET factors
There are not a lot of employees who fit the tenure requirement of having stayed for more than ten years. Among the other two criteria (Talent and Engagement),
9% – This is the performance improvement among employees who meet these two criteria compared to the average.
24% – This is the performance improvement among those who meet the two criteria compared to employees who are neither talented nor engaged.
Employee Productivity And Business Growth
It should be quite obvious by now that highly engaged employees are more productive and this should directly have a bearing on business growth. There have been a number of studies that look into this part of the equation.
2.3x – This is the revenue growth that organizations with highly engaged employees had over organizations where employee engagement was average (Source: UNC Kenanflager Business School)
$2400 – This is the average profit per employee gained by organizations who improved employee engagements by 10% (Source: Workplace Research Foundation)
64% – This is the employee engagement levels among American organizations in 2015 (Source: Aon Hewitt)
