Is your company’s true potential being optimally utilized?

Think twice before you disregard this question. Maybe the consistency of your team’s output hasn’t changed so you think all is well. But what about the quality?

Without reliable tools like remote employee monitoring software and techniques to help you maintain employee focus, an unfocused remote workforce producing low-quality output can quietly erode your business’s foundation.

This may go unnoticed until it manifests as significant setbacks. And even then, you may not be able to pinpoint their roots and true extent.

This article lays out the main reasons behind poor employee focus. It also provides actionable strategies to help you reclaim remote employee concentration and prevent your organization from falling short of its true capabilities.

The Consequences of Poor Employee Focus

A drop in employee focus can have deep and drastic effects on the company’s reputation, bottom line, but also the employees themselves:

• Financial Implications: According to Gallup’s study, one unfocused employee can cause their company to lose as much as 18% of their annual salary.

• Well-Being Deterioration: Results of a poll by Crucial Learning show that 73% of employees lack energy and struggle to find the motivation to complete their tasks.

• Low-Quality Work: Crucial Learning poll also tells us that 72.6% of surveyed people report worrying about their tasks and the amount of work. This anxiety can easily lead to forgetfulness, mistakes, and low-quality output.

• Lack of Energy: Lack of physical and mental energy reduces remote workers’ efficiency. The mentioned Crucial Learning poll reports that 71.7% of respondents felt they worked slower when struggling with focus.

• Feeling Overwhelmed: 73.2% of people told Crucial Learning that they feel they have too much to do. This pressure of a large looming workload can impair a person’s ability to think clearly and reduce their decision-making and problem-solving capacities.

To make things worse, the mentioned Gallup’s study also found that 67% of global employees lack engagement with their work.

Can you afford to risk it and just suppose your company is “probably an exception”?

The Common Roots of Poor Focus

Poor employee focus can be caused by environmental factors, but it can also have its source in employees’ personal habits – especially in a remote environment. 

Let’s take a look at the most common sources:

• Surroundings: Remote workers don’t have to deal with office chatter, but there are household members, noises, and other distractions that they need to deal with.

• Digital Distractions: The most powerful digital focus killers are personal devices. Without immediate supervision, the mere sight of their phone can distract your remote workers from their tasks.

• Information Overwhelm: Human working memory can process only a limited amount of data. When it gets overloaded, we lose focus. Your remote workers are more likely to face this problem as they are plugged into an incredible number of data sources.

• Poor Sleeping Habits: Insufficient sleep affects your cognitive functions, slows down your thought process, and reduces concentration. Chronic lack of sleep can even affect your employees’ memory.

• Insufficient Movement: Physical inactivity has a twofold negative effect on a person’s focus. Firstly, their muscles are likely to become tense and they will experience that distracting neck and back tightness. Secondly, their brains might not get enough nutrients and oxygen to work properly.

• Unhealthy Eating: An unhealthy or restrictive diet can severely affect your ability to focus. Without proper nourishment, you can face poor focus, memory loss, and fatigue.

How to Help Remote Workers Improve Their Focus

Here are seven ways you can help your employees gain better focus and productivity:

1. Implement an Employee Monitoring Software

Employee monitoring software is one of the essential tools to help you improve your remote employee focus.

A scalable monitoring system provides real-time monitoring data, such as apps, websites, and other resources used. It also records the amount of time each task takes, as well as idle time per day. This data gives you an overall picture of each of your employees’ focus fluctuations.

But this is just the beginning. The more powerful among these tools offer individual productivity levels, as well as early burnout predictions. All these parameters are calculated automatically, based on the level of your employees’ focus. Without these automatic reports, you would have piles of data without any actionable insights.

Instead, you can rely on the right kind of software and get detailed info about the engagement level of each of your employees and:

• Help them fight surrounding distractions and reinforce their accountability by sharing this data with them.
• Spot inefficiencies and potential digital distractions characteristic of each employee and team.
• Provide tailored support to anyone who is struggling with information overload and similar issues.

2. Advise Creating a Distraction-Free Workspace

To help your remote employees reach and maintain better focus during work hours, remind them to:

• Eliminate digital distractions: Encourage them to silence all work-related notifications as well as private devices when they need to focus. You can even suggest they remove their phones from their field of vision.

• Create a clean and clutter-free workspace: Advise your remote workers to choose a plain corner for their workspace and to keep it clean. The more clutter they are surrounded with, the harder it will be to focus.

3. Recommend Setting up a Rhythm

Support your remote employees in finding the best rhythm for themselves. This will enable them to fight environmental and digital distractions throughout the day more easily.

Here are several proven time-management methods that remote employees around the globe find effective:

• “Eat That Frog”: This is the idea that Brian Tracy presented in his book by the same title. It involves deciding on your priorities for the day and doing the most important and demanding task first thing in the morning.

• Time Blocking: Suggest your workers schedule several blocks throughout the day for different tasks that demand deep focus. Encourage them to silence their notifications so that they can concentrate better.

• Pomodoro: This technique incorporates a 25-minute focus period followed by a five-minute break. Advise that all distractions are eliminated during the focus periods.

4. Encourage Taking Regular Breaks

Although focus requires uninterrupted work, staying on one task for prolonged periods can be counterproductive. When you notice your employees are stuck on a task, suggest they take a break.

Some research has shown that prolonged exposure to one stimulus can reduce the concentration. This is when only a short period of switching focus to a different task can help fight this information overload and regain your full concentration.

5. Advocate Against Multitasking

Tolerating or, even worse, expecting your remote employees to multitask may be one of your worst mistakes.

Rapid task switching requires a lot of refocusing, which ends up consuming more time than focused work on one task would. This is why it’s much wiser to advise your employees to always work on one task at a time.

The Eisenhower Matrix can help them efficiently manage all work-related distractions coming in via digital channels. manage distractions. This is a simple chart that will allow them to jot down all incoming tasks for later and immediately sort them into one of four groups:

• Urgent and important
• Important but non-urgent
• Urgent but not important
• Non-urgent and not important

6. Suggest Practicing Mindfulness

For many remote workers, mindfulness is one of the best ways to start a workday. It consists of closing your eyes, breathing deeply, and focusing on your breath and your surroundings for a couple of minutes. This way, you get back to the present moment and realign your focus just before you get to your first task. The same technique can help throughout the day with fighting distractions from the surroundings.

You can also try incorporating classical music or nature sounds into your deep focus periods.

7. Promote Healthy Habits

Unhealthy habits can significantly affect your employees’ ability to focus. This is why you might want to consider having awareness days about the importance of:

• Healthy Sleep: Sleeping reduces the stress hormones that negatively affect our brains. Advise your employees to get at least seven hours of sleep each night.

• Regular Exercise: Explain that even light exercise can boost your blood flow and help your brain get all the nutrients. This improves memory and cognitive function.

• Eating Well: Recommend eating nuts, seeds, oily fish, and leafy greens instead. This will give them all the necessary nutrients to keep their brain responsive and their focus sharp.

Drops in focus and productivity can happen to any team, and your remote team is not an exception. The key is having enough info about their daily habits and activities to easily pinpoint the problem and provide a customized solution. Rely on the tools and techniques we suggested, and you will resolve any focus issues and boost your organization’s productivity in no time!