Monitoring every minute of your employees’ day may make you feel better, but it keeps them from doing their best work.
You could get a lot more done if your employees would just get off the internet and get to work, right? Some estimate that time spent not working results in $130 billion (with a b) in lost productivity. So the last thing you want is your employees on Facebook or personal email. (Reading Inc.com is, of course, always good for your business.)
But a new study done by a team of economists reports that, even if they’re working, it’s the the temptation of the forbidden internet that actually lowers their productivity. I’m always skeptical of research involving 60 volunteers, who are undoubtedly college students who had to volunteer for a study to get credit for their introductory psychology classes. Even so, the results are intriguing: They showed that concentration dropped when there was a video that the participants wanted to watch but were told not to.
The theory is, the energy to resist temptation detracted from their ability to focus on the task. Lesson: If you just let them watch the video, they can then focus on the task at hand.
…to read this article in full, visit leading US small business resource, Inc.
