What are productivity time wasters?
Some productivity time wasters are obvious—such as employees standing around the proverbial water cooler discussing the latest sports scores or what’s happening in their social life, or taking a quick (?) break to go outside to grab a cigarette. However, there are many more subtle productivity time wasters that are contributing to business losses due to decreased worker productivity. The productivity time wasters are not always caused by the employee; many times they are as a direct result of the work environment. For example: Call her Mary the Oppressed. A senior sales director at a small business-to-business dotcom in New York City, she was living in open-space hell. Arrived recently from a publishing firm, she is nearly 40 years old and had had her own office for 15 years. Now she found herself among 30 people, grouped according to job function, sitting at long tables arranged to form a rectangle in a 5,000-sq.-ft. room with a concrete floor and bare windows. After a “hideous” six m
