Technological advancements have revolutionised the way businesses work. Accessible resources, broader marketing insights and targets, more-effective communication, and telecommuting working opportunities are some of the key benefits offered by technology to purport company’s progressive endeavours.

When these great technological advancement meets the productive workers, the business goals, targets and deadlines seem closer to achieve. Employers expectation keeps growing at the same point in time, thus demanding and expecting employees to be highly productive, provide high-quality output and meet industry demands.

Unfortunately, employers’ high expectation doesn’t always meet the reality of quality excellence. The demands, not to blame are sometimes even unrealistic in nature.  Employees busyness at work everyday with no time for a breather, could make them less productive in the years to come.

Some must-do daily tasks that are viewed to be crucial and critical in nature can cost  extra man hours of an hard-working employee and loss of productive time. Since their productive hours are consumed in addressing less-critical issues, primary tasks and responsibilities that can be managed by workforce at a junior level.

See also: Work Smart or Work Hard? What is the Best Way to Avoid Productivity Drain?

While technology has always been referred to as an enabler to save on time and costs, sometimes technology also contributes to productive time loss. Beyond its numerous benefits, technology provides room for distractions and diversion to create an environment with dampened morale and low productivity

Here are some must-do tasks that cost employees’ productive time loss at work. Do you think these can be automated by technology or allotted strict hours to execute only during those times of the day? Read to know what works best for your business constraints:

Ineffective Meetings. Based on a survey held by Salary.com, 24% of respondents said that many meetings and conference calls waste their productive time at work. While, organising meeting is important to gathers all staff members and managers to discuss issues, ask for update, formulate a policy or business plan, discuss about a project and so on.

Employees feel frequently trapped in long lengthy conference calls and ineffective meetings that discuss on topics beyond their scope of operations in a department or overall understanding. Hence they tend to lose interest, seek curiosity and illuminate on ideas. Such meetings are clear waste of productive time, especially when workers are struggling with prior commitments and deadlines at work to wrap up tasks for the day.

It is time for employers to rethink about the effectiveness of their regular weekly update meeting strategy and streamline the process to allow for productive brief discussions at regular intervals, as agreed upon in consent with all members of the team.

Social media networking. Many employees prefer to utilize social media platforms to support their job working. Networking and marketing can be easily done through popular social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Twitter, and more.

However, employees are frequently overly-engrossed, wasting time on exploring the social media alternatives and harnessing the technology. This can turn out to be the most time consuming exercise. Checking for news feed, replying to comments from followers, temptation to stalk friends’ accounts could kill much time and distract the concentration of the employees at work.

Checking emails. Hundreds of emails keep pouring into your Inboxes every single day, and this significantly cuts down the employees’ productivity at work. Reading and replying to emails is a time killer, and this is a must-do to avoid procrastination.

If possible, managers can help employees prioritize on some most urgent emails that seek immediate responses such as customer complaints and clients’ official emails. Limit the number of emails upto 25 per day. This will help the employees to save on productive time and further allocate time for other job responsibilities to be executed in a day at work as well.

Staying on the phone. Picking up phone call of customers might consume 2 minutes in a brief conversation, but in most occasions these telephonic conversations seem never ending and can consume more than 10 minutes on a single call. Talkative clients enjoy engrossing conversation with employees to eat on their productive time, handling an ineffective phone call.

It is better to set timelines and adhere to them strictly with specific allotted for each task and lengthy phone calls should be made to succinct snappy conversations at work. Sometimes a polite interruption might be needed to skip the unnecessary discussion on a phone call.

Employees productive time loss can prove to be expensive for business and time lost can never be brought back. Hence managers should work in close coordination with employees to ensure that necessary help is being provided to save on their time and maximise performance efficiency at work.

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