To
drive productivity on your team, create an office environment that limits pet
peeves and distractions.
To boost employee engagement and productivity, it's critical for your team to
have an office environment that sets employees up for success. But all too
often, employee productivity takes a hit as a result of pet peeves and
other distractions around the office.
Zety, a resume builder and career website,
recently released the results of a survey that
asked approximately 1,000 U.S. employees about common annoyances at work
and how often they happen.
The top 10 pet peeves revealed on the list
are:
1.
Co-workers coming to
work sick
2.
Malfunctioning
hardware or slow computers
3.
Co-workers coming in
late or leaving early
4.
Co-workers not washing
their hands before leaving the bathroom
5.
Arranging meetings
over issues that could have been resolved in an email
6.
Printer jammed or
broken
7.
Co-workers chatting
with each other or on the phone in a shared room
8.
Slow Wi-Fi
9.
Co-workers texting/browsing
social media during work hours
10.
Too many
meetings
Based on a few key trends in
the findings, I outlined a few steps your organization can take to avoid
common pet peeves.
1. Trust employees to
manage their own time.
The survey found that 87 percent of
respondents find it annoying when colleagues come into the office sick.
Between flu season, other illnesses, and
headlines about coronavirus, it's important for your team to take any
measures possible to prevent your employees from getting sick.
One simple way to prevent the spread of
illnesses at your office is to have an open remote work policy. Encourage
employees to work from home, whether they're not feeling well or simply
want to get some heads-down work done without distractions.
Beyond avoiding the spread of illness, more
flexible workplace policies across the board can help boost employee engagement
and create a more productive environment. Several of the other pet peeves on
the list related to how employees spend their time -- including coming in late
or leaving early, doing non-work activities during work hours, and having too
many unnecessary meetings.
At my company of more than 200 employees, we
have the mindset that as long as you get your work done, we trust you to manage
your time. For example, if you need to arrange your schedule to meet personal
obligations or text a family member due to a change of plans, that's
perfectly fine. Or if you want to block your calendar to get work done for a
few hours -- avoiding potentially unnecessary meetings in the process -- we
strongly encourage this.
2. Invest in
reliable technology for your employees.
Another common trend across pet peeves on the
list is issues related to technology -- things like slow computers, broken
printers, and slow Wi-Fi. Most of your employees likely depend on their
computers and related technology in their day-to-day roles. To help set your
employees up for success, it's important to make technology a priority at your
organization.
At my company, each time we have a new
"starting class" of new employees arriving on a given week,
our IT department is notified well in advance, so that the new hires' computers
are set up with all the logins, software and other requirements they need. No
new hire wants to show up on the first day only to find out their computer
isn't ready -- or worse, that it's broken.
To resolve other common pet peeves, we have
several printers around the office and make sure to notify the whole company
via Slack if one of them is down -- and we do our best to get it up and
running quickly. And while we have a primary Wi-Fi network, we have at least
one backup in place just in case.
If your employees run into too many technical
issues, not only will this lead to lost productivity across your organization,
but it will also cause employees to get frustrated -- and they might even seek
other jobs as a result.
By taking steps to avoid common workplace
frustrations like these, you can boost employee satisfaction and set your
organization up for continued success.
PUBLISHED
ON: MAR 3, 2020
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com
columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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