In the business world, time really is money. Here are the top 5 time sinks at work and how enterprise social networking helps you be more productive.

Switching between Tasks

The average worker switches tasks every 3 minutes, forcing a ridiculous amount of time and cognitive resources into refocusing. Human beings are easily fascinated, often leading to our short attention span. But, how can we embrace this overpowering tendency to multi-task? Enterprise social networking provides a single pane of glass that incorporates multiple applications so that switching through a myriad of tasks, whether on a desktop computer or smartphone, is much more manageable.

Finding Expertise and Key Information

Tracking down the right person and information through a bunch of phone calls and emails is a serious waste of time. McKinsey Global Institute estimates we spend about 2 hours of our workday searching for experts and information, which we can find 35% faster through an enterprise social network. With a social platform, messages become searchable content, and finding answers is as simple as posting on a wall.

Too many Meetings

How often do you find yourself spending hours in meetings when that time could be better used for getting real work done? With an enterprise social network, some of the conversations from regular in-person meetings can be moved over to an organized subject, where employees can give their status updates, brainstorm new ideas and collaborate on deliverables, ensuring everyone who needs to be in the loop is updated. Subjects organize information, so employees can tune into conversations that relate to them while filtering out the noise of unrelated topics.

Email Overload

The average worker fields over 100 messages each day. That’s a lot of information to manage. But, before you start filing those emails into tidy little folders, did you know categorizing emails may actually be a huge waste of time? Studies have shown content search actually takes longer when sifting through “organized” folders as opposed to simply using the search functions or scrolling. According to a study by McKinsey GI, a private social network eliminates email inefficiencies – boosting productivity up to 25%. Problem solved.

Unnecessary Chatter

Cited as the number one time waster in the office, casual conversations are a huge time sink, but discouraging chitchat may have detrimental effects on relationships and teamwork as well. So rather than spend the time and energy scrutinizing this natural team building activity, why not repurpose these conversations to be contextualized for work? Providing employees a social platform where they are encouraged to have casual conversations (in an online work environment) not only ensures workers are staying on task, it can boost innovation, team building, and genuine ideation. Who knows, a casual conversation could brew the next billion-dollar idea for your company.