A new study from BambooHR, which polled more than 1,000 U.S.-based employees, reveals that contrary to the popular belief that social media and surfing the web are now the major distractions in today’s modern workplace, it turns out that traditional activities, like taking breaks to the office water cooler/break room and participating in small talk, still reign supreme as the most time-consuming workplace distractions.
Key survey findings include:
- Employees spend more time on traditional distractions (breaks to the office kitchen/water cooler/break room, small talk/gossip with coworkers) than digital (surfing the web, social media, texting).
- Across the board, upper management and executives spend more time participating in these types of activities than lower-level employees.
- Women consider office small talk/gossip to be more important to workplace productivity than men; men consider using social media for personal use to be more important to workplace productivity than women.
