Digital distractions are all around us. Harvard Business Review conducted a study in 2022 that found that workers switch between different apps and websites around 1,200 times per workday.

This leads to a significant reduction in employees’ focus capacity. In other words, they spend almost four hours every week trying to regain their focus from different digital distractions.

Some data even suggests that businesses that handle technology and communications inefficiently may be missing out on $1.3 trillion in additional revenue per year.

This article lays out all the major digital distractors you should pay attention to. We also look into the proven ways, like computer monitoring software, that can help your employees refocus.
 

Common Digital Distractions Remote Workers Face

Working from home eliminates office chatter and allows employees to organize their workspace in a way that best fits their work style. Yet, there is a different set of distractions that come with remote work that can be hard to combat:

1. Direct Messages

Corporate direct messaging platforms blossomed as a solution for the lack of direct communication in remote settings compared to offices. For example, an average Slack user sends around 200 messages weekly.

Yet, their indiscriminate use and lack of boundaries have often been reported as a significant problem. Constant Slack and Teams pings can be sources of distractions that lead to mistakes, burnout, and a serious dip in productivity.

2. Incoming Emails

Many businesses started using direct messaging platforms to reduce the number of emails. However, the email situation is just getting worse. An average worker receives 74 emails per day and sends 26 messages. Unfortunately, many employees lack the skills to organize their time and stop the constant influx of mail from disturbing their focus.

3. Frequent Meetings

Unfocused meetings are one of the major issues that remote workers face. In the U.S. alone, around 24 billion hours and $37 billion are lost due to unproductive or unnecessary meetings.

Meetings are being scheduled for questions that can easily be resolved via asynchronous communication channels. On top of this, many workers feel they are being invited to conference calls that have nothing or very little to do with their assignments.

4. SaaS Sprawl

SaaS sprawl is a situation where a company piles up the amount of SaaS accounts. On average, every 30 days, an organization’s environment gets “richer” with another 6 apps.

This starts causing employee confusion, communication breakdowns, and security issues. The more applications and platforms your team uses, the greater the possibility that information will be duplicated or hard to find. This increases frustration and also creates a broader surface for cyber attacks.

5. Personal Phones

Personal phones are a major source of distractions. According to BBC Maestro, an average person checks their phone 58 times per day. Around half of those times, i.e. 52%, are within the workday window.

According to TeamStage, eight out of 10 American workers admit to visiting different social media sites during work hours.

If not managed correctly, the constant notifications on our devices can easily ruin our workday.

Strategies to Minimize Distractions & Stay Focused

Employee distractions significantly reduce overall company productivity by increasing errors, lowering focus, and causing delays in task completion. Ultimately, they impact business efficiency and revenue.

To help your employees stay focused and fight digital distractions, you can try several tried-and-true strategies:

1. Implement an Employee Monitoring Software

Employee monitoring software helps both employers and employees fight digital distractions during work hours.

You can use this software to analyze your employees’ peak performance and distraction times. The activity tracking feature lets you pinpoint the reasons behind the productivity drops, like messaging apps, certain tasks, etc. 

Without this data, you can only provide useless general advice and watch good employees spiral deeper before leaving your company. The key here is to approach the issue as searching and providing a solution to a problem, not as “digging for evidence” against your employees.

Digital distractions often work on a subconscious level. Your employees may think they are spending only three-minute breaks on their social media, whereas their lost time may amount to a couple of hours.

With proper tracking tools, your workers can gain exact insight into their work patterns. They can better understand when they are most productive and when they are most susceptible to distractions. Additionally, they can discover the types of distractions that take them most time to recover from.
 

2. Schedule Quiet Times

Set a few ground rules for your employees to create room for undisturbed work and help them control digital distractions:

• Always think twice before you send out that meeting invitation. Consider who really needs to be in the meeting and if the meeting is actually necessary.
• Encourage turning off work-related notifications and setting aside time for deep work. Remind everyone to set availability status on the company’s DM platform and to respect their colleagues’ signals.
• Advise your employees to create daily schedules with set times for checking emails or attending meetings. This way they won’t fall into a trap of constantly being “available”, inviting more interruptions.

3. Limit Non-Work-Related Apps

The majority of us have accounts on multiple social networks. Notifications on these apps are designed to keep us scrolling as long as possible. This is a huge temptation to fight, but it can be done with the right strategy:

• Suggest your employees install an internet-blocking app and use it during work hours.
• Talk about using Do Not Disturb or Focus mode on their devices to avoid disturbances from personal social media accounts and other platforms.

4. Keep Your Workspace Distraction-Free
 

There are numerous distractions your employees can face at home. However, when it comes to digital distractions, it boils down to their personal phones and other devices.

Sometimes, it’s not enough to turn on Do Not Disturb mode. This is why you can suggest they keep their devices in another room while working. This way they can maximize their productivity more easily.
 

5. Have a Company Apps “Purge”

If you have noticed your organization is developing a problem with SaaS sprawl, strive to resolve this ASAP.

Define the exact purpose of each app and channel. Robust employee computer monitoring software can help you identify the level of use of each SaaS you have purchased. There are bound to be accounts or even apps that are completely unused. Unsubscribe from these services to cut costs and reduce the app overload for your team.

Try and adapt these strategies to eliminate distractions within your team and boost your organization’s productivity. Pair them up with a powerful employee monitoring tool for additional useful insights and watch your remote team’s efficiency soar!