#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Every office runs into some form of distraction that plagues the workplace. Distractions are incredibly common and can damage productivity, focus and employee morale.

In fact, a 2015 survey from Oxford Economics found that employee satisfaction and productivity are affected quite negatively by distractions in the workplace specifically caused by cubicle setups. However, cubicle farms aren’t the only reasons distractions occur.  

Here are some of the most common distractions plaguing the workplace and how employers can easily overcome them.

We may be more satisfied with our jobs than we were a decade ago—at least according to Gallup’s research. But employee engagement and retention continue to be among the top challenge companies face around the world, per a report from Deloitte on global human resource trends. That’s because disengaged workers come with a hefty price tag. Gallup estimates that the U.S. economy loses up to $550 billion per year when productivity flags as a result of unhappy employees.

In what they describe as the first study of "spatial management," the researchers analyzed data from the more than 2,000 workers at a large technology company with several locations across the U.S. and Europe over two years.

They discovered that seating the right types of workers together led to increased productivity and profits. The proper proximity, they write, "has been shown to generate up to a 15% increase in organizational performance. For an organization of 2,000 workers, strategic seating planning could add an estimated $1 million per annum to profit."

Have you ever worked hard to improve a valuable skill and made real progress, only to have your development go unnoticed by the people who told you that you needed to improve? Perhaps this led you to look for a new job. Or maybe you’re a manager who’s been disappointed by poor performance and concluded that your low-performing employees are simply over-entitled? So you gave up on trying to help them improve and vented your frustration with colleagues behind closed doors.

Both of these commonplace experiences point to problems caused by a fixed mindset, in which we find it hard to believe that people can change. In the first scenario, an employee is judged as having low potential—and this assessment blinds leaders to the progress he’s made. In the second, the manager’s conviction that her employees will never change makes her less likely to engage in leadership behaviors that support development. The bottom line in both cases is that employees are less likely to reach their potential.

Harness the power of video learning, create a collaborative culture with employee-generated content, and drive engagement with targeted content to really boost learning impact.

If the answer to these last two questions is “rarely,” it wouldn’t surprise us. We don’t believe that swift, wholesale culture change is possible — or even desirable. After all, a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of how its people interact and work. However, it is an elusively complex entity that survives and evolves mostly through gradual shifts in leadership, strategy, and other circumstances. We find the most useful definition is also the simplest: Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that determines how things are done.

Made of instinctive, repetitive habits and emotional responses, culture can’t be copied or easily pinned down. Corporate cultures are constantly self-renewing and slowly evolving: What people feel, think, and believe is reflected and shaped by the way they go about their business. Formal efforts to change a culture (to replace it with something entirely new and different) seldom manage to get to the heart of what motivates people, what makes them tick. Strongly worded memos from on high are deleted within hours. You can plaster the walls with large banners proclaiming new values, but people will go about their days, right beneath those signs, continuing with the habits that are familiar and comfortable.

But this inherent complexity shouldn’t deter leaders from trying to use culture as a lever. If you cannot simply replace the entire machine, work on realigning some of the more useful cogs. The name of the game is making use of what you cannot change by using some of the emotional forces within your current culture differently.