Attention Management - Deficit at Workplace
According to a poll released by Salary.com, 14% of employees of a company waste 3 hours daily, 22% waste 2 hours a day and 64% waste 1 hour a day. One of the biggest culprits was internet-surfing, which caused 48% of employees to waste their time on it.
A functional objective behind every company and subsequently every manager is to increase productivity. Every company wants the best from their workforce, but it would be overwhelming to use a small team to do multi-tasking and increase profits. This is where a manager comes into picture; a manager tries to extract more from less.
When you try to think on the lines of how attention deficit affects us in our daily lives, we can see that things have not been very different for us within the confines of the office chambers as well. Companies have started to come to terms with the fact that their employees are now getting more and more distracted from their work. Even those who focus on their work are more interested in getting a large volume of work done, as compared to getting the work done properly.
Quantity has replaced quality
Just as today’s generation is more likely to lay its eyes on the Mona Lisa Smile and say, “Well, that’s it, it’s done! Bring in the next one! I haven’t got all day!”.
A manager is more likely to say to his team to sacrifice more and more quality at the altar of quantity, as he himself does not have the attention needed for a detailed quality check. When someone like this becomes a manager, he is suddenly asked to focus on some very specific areas of organizational operation, such as delivering training, increasing expertise of the team and paying “attention to the closest details.
Managers need to be able to overcome their own distraction issues, both in their personal and professional lives, before they instruct their team-mates about it. A distracted manager cannot maintain an attentive team. So, the first thing one should consider is where they focus most of their attention.
CEOs Leads the Company
To determine the attention management of a company, one has to determine the attention of its CEO. A CEO should pay attention to the company and its employees to yield better productivity. It’s important that the CEO understands the different types of attention and various attention management techniques to encourage their employees.
