Wondering why your team has been underperforming lately?
One of the main culprits may be bad work habits within your organization.
When we say bad work habits, we mean a lot of things:
- Multitasking,
- Procrastinating,
- Tardiness (whether showing up late or breaking deadlines),
- Poor communication, and others.
Still, no workplace is perfect, and some of the said things will happen occasionally. However, if they occur on a daily basis — you have a problem.
Now, what if we told you that you can eliminate bad workplace habits by implementing just one single thing?
The answer lies in time tracking.
Yes, by vigilantly tracking your employee time, you can remove distractions and help employees stay focused at work.
Explore the following tips to limit distractions in the workplace that have slipped under your radar.
Table of Contents
#1: Track time on your goals
To start with, ask yourself a question — do your employees behave as if they know how much time they spend achieving certain goals?
If your answer is anything but a sound yes, read on.
Tracking time on your employees’ goals helps them stay accountable and gives you a better understanding of their goal progress.
By keeping track of your employees’ goals, you can estimate exactly how much time goes into finishing each goal separately — lowering the risk of resource wastage to a minimum.
As for how to track your goals, you can make use of an app that does all the heavy lifting.
With a tried-and-tested app, you can:
- See each goal as a project,
- Break goals down into smaller parts, like tasks,
- Assign people to each task,
- See task progress,
- Set rates, and more.
Not only do your employees have their eyes on the goal — but you also get real insights into their progress and efficiency.
💡 CLOCKIFY PRO TIP
Read on to learn how to set SMART goals in more detail:
#2: Teach prioritization techniques
Just because your employees don’t boast high organizational skills in the workplace — that doesn’t mean they are unable to be highly organized.
Maybe you are using a bad system (or no system at all) for workload organization in your team. No matter what it is, we’ll help you manage it.
As a highly successful productivity technique, time blocking helps your employees sharpen their prioritization skills by focusing on what’s important and managing their time more effectively.
Moreover, time blocking is highly useful when there are many things to do, especially critical items.
So, how does time blocking work?
Basically, time blocking allows you to divide your workday into time blocks. For each activity (task or project), you get to schedule a time block to work on them.
A time tracking and management app, Clockify offers time blocking that lets you devote a period of time to company training from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday (just like in the image below).
Just like that, your employees get a graphic insight into their daily tasks and responsibilities. As soon as they finish one time block, they move on to the next, and the cycle repeats until they finish each task for a specific workday.
Probably the best thing about this time management technique is that it prevents multitasking and juggling between tasks.
Later, you as a manager get to see detailed reports on their work, completely reducing time wastage and staying on top of your to-dos.
#3: Take regular breaks
Your employees may be displaying unproductive behavior because they can’t seem to devote time for rest during the workday (or take too much time resting).
Now, either you take a pen and paper to record each time someone goes on a break or you simply use an app that helps you track employee breaks automatically.
A simple time tracker such as Clockify can make the job easier — all you need to do is enable the Breaks feature in the workspace settings, and you’re good to go.
You can either enable the Breaks feature for the entire workspace or select a default break project. Later, employees can select Break mode in the dropdown menu whenever they want to take a break from work.
With Clockify, you can easily have your employees track their break time, helping them manage their workday better. Most importantly, this option ensures everybody takes time to recharge and that productivity is not hindered.
#4: Reduce distractions
Distractions in the workplace are everywhere — checking emails, chatty colleagues, background noises, social media, and many more.
In fact, a survey on workplace distractions showed that office workers spend as much as 7 hours a week casually surfing the web and 8.4 hours weekly on non-work related calls and text messages. That’s a lot of corporate time wasted.
While you can’t really forbid using phones in the workplace, you can do some things to help employees fight off distractions and stay focused at work.
For example, creating a routine can help remove distractions and stick to the schedule.
By tracking your employees’ time, you can see who’s doing what and when at all times. Then, you can easily identify if any of your employees are wasting their time — if some of them are overworked or underperforming.
If you take a look at Clockify’s Team Dashboard section, you can see a visual breakdown of your employees’ activity, tracked time, what they’re working on, and more.
Such insights allow you to see:
- Where your employees spend their time,
- What they’re working on at the moment,
- The amount of time spent on tasks and projects,
- Potential bottlenecks, and more.
Overall, introducing time tracking into your company doesn’t mean micromanagement if it’s implemented properly, using the right tool.
On the contrary, employees can develop a sense of team accountability when they’re aware their time is being tracked and can focus better, too. They’ll rarely have time to scroll through social media or feel bored at work, so workplace distractions can be minimized.
💡 CLOCKIFY PRO TIP
Speaking of workplace distractions, check out the following text that lists some astounding statistics on the effects of workplace distractions in 2024:
Fight off bad working habits once and for all — with Clockify
As you can see, choosing the right app can give you useful ideas on how to avoid distractions at work.
For example, Clockify motivates and supports your employees to track time, instead of alienating or micromanaging them.
Clockify is a user-friendly, intuitive tool that your employees will love using. Its features are easy to pick up and require minimal effort.
As a matter of fact, if you have any doubts about using Clockify, feel free to:
- Check out Clockify testimonials,
- Contact the support team via phone, email, or live chat for additional questions and concerns, or
- Watch video tutorials and make use of the illustrated Help pages for further reference.
Finally, Clockify can help you and your employees set up a smooth working atmosphere free from distractions.
