CAREER & HIRING ADVICE

WhatIs.com defines employee productivity as “an assessment of the efficiency of a worker or group of workers.”

In essence, employee productivity measures how much valuable work an employee does for a company in a given period. Companies need employees with high productivity rates if they want to succeed.

Companies need productive employees to make a profit. However, most studies show employees are only productive about 60% of the time and are more likely to be productive working from home. Being interrupted every 3 minutes at work and ineffective meetings contribute to employees’ unproductivity. 

In this article, we’ll give you 15 interesting and helpful employee productivity statistics that are relevant today. Hopefully, you can use these statistics to implement new policies in your business and increase your workforce’s overall efficiency.

Employees Are More Likely To Be Productive at Home

Whether it’s because of the lack of noise and distractions usually associated with working in a crowded office, the refreshing elimination of daily commutes, or the increased comfort of self-declared introverts, four times the number of employees polled admit that they’re more productive when working from home. 

Employees are often distracted by coworkers, ringing phones, loud conversations, and people moving around in the workplace. Once an employee is distracted, it takes them an average of 23 minutes to refocus. When working from home, most of these distractions aren’t an issue.

Other employees, those self-described introverts, claim they can just get more done when they’re comfortable in their homes, away from the pressures of having to socialize and interact with others in the office. 

Still, others credit their increased productivity to not having to waste hours each day commuting back and forth to work. Because they have no commutes, they feel more comfortable and less bitter about working extra hours from home if they need to do so to finish a project.

The Average Employee Is Interrupted Every Three Minutes

It may take people 23 minutes to get refocused after an interruption, but luckily, interruptions don’t happen that often, right? Wrong!

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, employees are interrupted approximately every three minutes and five seconds. Let me repeat that: every three minutes and five seconds, and that’s followed by 23 minutes of trying to refocus. 

That means people are getting three minutes of work done for every 26 minutes they spend at the office. That’s almost unbelievable.

Work-From-Home Employees Are 52% Less Likely To Take Time off Work

I’ve already mentioned that employees are motivated to work harder. They also take less time off work. Work-from-home employees often continue working from home without calling in sick, and use less vacation and personal time.

86% of Employees Prefer To Work Alone

At least 86% of employees prefer to work alone whether they’re working from home or the office. Employees claim there are fewer distractions when they can separate themselves from others.

They also feel less pressure to behave or interact in specific ways and can focus entirely on their work. 

This independence also extends to projects. Many employees prefer to tackle projects solo than to be forced to rely on others to do their part of a collaborative project. In most cases, this is still true even if working alone means the employee must work harder.

The Average Office Worker Is Productive for Less Than 3 Hours a Day

In all career fields, the average worker is productive for 60% or less each day. For office workers, however, that percentage drops drastically. Research conducted by Voucher Cloud determined that the average office worker is only productive for two hours and 23 minutes each day. 

Assuming an eight-hour workday, office workers are generally unproductive for five hours and 37 minutes each day. That’s a massive chunk of time and employer’s money wasted every day. 

Freelancers Are Productive 36 Hours Each Week

In contrast to the typical office worker, the typical freelancer is productive for about 36 hours each week. If you assume freelancers are working five-day weeks like most people, that averages out to over seven hours of productivity a day. 

They work harder than people in other professions because there’s a direct correlation between the time they spend working and how much they get paid. Inefficient freelancers don’t make much money; it’s as simple as that.

Meetings Are Extremely Unproductive

Although meetings aren’t always a gigantic waste of time, research has shown that they aren’t always productive either. One study conducted by Atlassian yielded the following shocking results about meetings:

• 91% of employees daydream in meetings
• 39% of employees have slept in meetings
• 96% of people have missed at least one “mandatory” meeting
• 73% of people worked on other work while in a meeting
• 50% of employees consider meetings wasted time
• 89% of employees complain about “ineffective or poorly organized meetings”

That’s quite a bit of wasted and ill-used time.

Obesity and Other Chronic Health Problems Cost Employers Over $150 Billion Annually

Employers incur $153 billion in losses every year due to employee obesity and other chronic health problems. These costs include lost revenue due to illness, paying sick leave, insurance costs, etc. 

Can you imagine how much of these costs companies might mitigate if they’d merely incorporate daily exercise time into their workdays or provide better access to preemptive wellness checks and healthcare?

They could even offer incentives or bonuses for meeting wellness milestones to entice people to become healthier.

Facebook Costs Employers $28 Billion Annually