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Everyone struggles with distractions at work. And we're not talking about a few minutes occasionally. Studies consistently show that the average worker is distracted more than two hours every day. Read that again - two hours every day! That really adds up when you multiply it by every worker in your office. The obvious question is why are they so distracted? What is occupying our workers attention and how do you free them to get back to work?

Most any worker will tell you that the primary problem in the office is unwanted noise. Unwanted noise is intrusive and interrupts our train of thought, thus proving quite distracting. But the biggest problem with distraction is that it leads to stress and mistakes. Distracted workers feel frustrated because they lose so much time that they often end up either not meeting deadlines or working evenings and even weekends to make up the time. In addition, distracted workers make more mistakes than focused workers. Being stressed, error-prone, and overworked leads us back to where we started: frustration.

Distracted Workers are Disengaged Workers

Stress, errors and office noise in general have contributed to the creation of disengaged workers who no longer have a connection with their job and have lost any motivation to go the extra mile. Disengaged workers cost businesses billions of dollars a year due to:

- decreased productivity

- increased errors

- work-related stress

- more sick days

- high turn-over

And this is why distracted workers are frustrated. They are stressed, losing their work hours and ready to move to a better work location. Unfortunately, the new job comes with a new set of noisy distractions and the problems repeat themselves.