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Social Media and Screen Addiction: The Death of Productivity (Part II)

Social Media and Screen Addiction: The Death of Productivity (Part II)

In our previous post on Social Media and Screen Addiction, we spoke about just how big the problem of screen addiction is, and how it is related to “propinquity” (the fact that the things that are closest to us in physical space have the biggest effect on our psychological experience of the world). We also discussed the adverse impacts this has on our productivity and left you with the good news  that this addiction can be dealt with. In today’s blog post we discuss how to do that, but before that, we spend a little more time understanding what it is about screens that make them so irresistible.

Why are Screens So Hard to Resist?

  1. The Elimination of Stopping Cues

    The lack of “stopping cues” make it very difficult to stop our consumption of information on social media. The “feed” we scroll is never-ending. Unlike, say a newspaper, or a book. When you get to the end, you know that is the end and you move on to other things. This is not true for screens. For example, the concept of “binge watching” is a fairly new concept. Earlier after the end of one episode, you knew you had to wait another day, or another week for the next episode to air. Today, “next” is the new default, and without us having to do anything. The auto-play on Netflix, or YouTube does it for us. Stopping cues no longer exist. This inevitably makes us spend more time than we used to spend before, engaging with screens.

  1. The Promise of Instant Gratification

    Social Media brought along with it the promise of instant gratification, and also the need for an instant validation. Every time you post something, you keep coming back to check how many “likes” your post has. And the thought of no one responding feels terrifying, almost invalidating. And so you go back again and again, to post and to seek and experience feedback and gratification.

  1. The Power of Goals

    Social media offers us a real driving force in terms of the power of goals. The goals of acquiring an ever-growing round number of followers, likes, shares, etc. While you may realize at some point that the addiction undermines you in the longer run, it is something you want to return to in the short-term again and again because it feels harmless, and you want to do it. This is true of a lot of screen experiences.

Tackling Social Media and Screen Addiction

The first step towards tackling social media and screen addiction is understanding the consequences of the same. Would you believe us if we said it has physical, financial, psychological and sociological consequences? Here is how –

  • Physical: With the amount of time we spend on our phones and screens, we tend to move into a sedentary lifestyle, and hence there is less mobility in our already limited mobility lifestyles. Over use of screens impacts the eyesight. It can even be dangerous for us, and other people when we use our phones without paying attention to our surroundings – especially while walking or driving.
  • Financial: Self-explanatory, if you are the kind who spend money on games/ apps.
  • Psychological: As discussed in the earlier post, screen addiction has had a big impact on how we deal with boredom. Our attitude to boredom has changed to the extent that we cannot sit with our thoughts even for a few minutes. One seems to be ever so resistant to having an ‘idle experience’, and a notification is all it takes to get distracted and plunge into the screen world.
  • Social: With an increase in dependency on screens, it is no surprise that how we experience time with people has changed. Most of our lives are spent in the virtual world – and isn’t that sad? With access to social media, we have the option to not be in the “now” and hence we are never really in this moment. We always have the option to escape the imperfect real world, to get to the perfect virtual world which is at our finger tips.

Tackling Screen Addiction

Now that we have a fairly concise idea about the hydra headed monster we are dealing with, we can look at what solutions we have to tackle it. At the outset, it must be said that it is not possible to completely abstain from social media and screens. We need technology for everything we do, and hence going cold turkey isn’t a good idea. However, here is how you can have a balanced experience and keep the addiction away.

  1. Working on your Awareness

    The foremost thing to do is being aware. Once you have taken stock of how much time you really spend on screens and social media, ask yourself what is it that makes you turn to screens and social media. For example, is this something you do to tackle boredom, or anxiety, or loneliness? Once you get to the core of the issue, and confront the reason, you will realize that your phone is probably not a solution and that these problems need to be addressed for real.

  2. Setting Limits

    It can be immensely useful to be mindful of your consumption of the virtual world. For certain times of the day, make it a point to not have your phone near you. Make it physically harder to reach your phone. Pick a time, set a basic rule, and tell yourself “between 6 PM and 8 PM I am not going to use my phone. I am going to indulge in mindful activities.” This will enable you to have richer, more real experiences. You will be creating the mind space to read, think and be creative.

  3. Practicing mindfulness

    How about swapping mindless scrolling for hours, for having a mindful experience of the real world? Once you have decided to put your phone away, think about the activities that you really wish you had time for, and immerse yourself. You can spend outdoors, or do things you have always liked, which will make you feel better about yourself.

Summing it Up

Remember that there is never an end to how much you can consume on social media – feeds are bottomless. Therefore, you have to force yourself to break away so that you can be mindful of your consumption and not let it hamper your productivity. The platforms we spend a lot of time on, are designed to encourage exactly that, i.e,  mindless experiences in the forms of clicks and likes. It is always important to remember that you have a choice. And at some point, it pays to make that choice to step away.

We hope you enjoyed the two-part series, and it has helped you to gain some amount of perspective in understanding how screen addiction, social media and a loss of productivity are related, and how you can tackle screen addiction!

P.S. This series is inspired by the Calm Masterclass on Social Media and Screen Addiction by Dr. Adam Alter. Calm is a mindfulness and meditation app which offers guided and non-guided meditations. You can get it  here.

Social Media and Screen Addiction: The Death of Productivity (Part 1)

Social Media and Screen Addiction: The Death of Productivity (Part 1)

When Twenty Four Hours isn’t Enough

Never enough time to do everything you plan to do in a day? Have you ever wondered that your phone and social media usage might have something to do with this problem? The pull of screens and social media has never been more over powering. Our phones might as well be an extension of our being. While screens, and the information that they give us access to can be enabling, they pose a big threat to our productivity when used indiscriminately. It is difficult to tackle a bad habit, in this case screen addiction, unless we understand what it is, how it impacts us and what we can do to deal with it. We delve into this problem in-depth with our two-part series of exploring the problem of Social Media and Screen Addiction, how it impacts productivity adversely and how we can deal with this very real problem.

The Magnitude of the Problem

Screens are very addictive – and though we needn’t really a cite a research to prove this point, for the sake of being factual: a recent research shows us that an average Indian spends about 2.5 hours on various apps every day. This doesn’t come as a surprise because no matter where we are, our phones are within our reach all the time. The very first step towards eliminating, or even reducing social media and screen addiction is to be aware of how dependent we are on it, by checking how long we spend on a screen.

Fortunately, technology enables us to do that through apps. Apps like AntiSocial track your daily activity on your phone, and collate data about your daily, weekly and monthly usage. You can also set a time limit for the apps you use on the phone, and AntiSocial will block those apps from being used after you have exhausted your time limit allotted for them. Of course, you can unblock the apps for usage. However, you do it with the knowledge that you are spending more time than you intended to, on being unproductive.

Understanding Propinquity

There is a concept in psychology known as ‘propinquity’. What it means is, things that are closest to you in physical space have the biggest effect on your psychological experience of the world. Understanding this concept with relation to our phones makes sense. Our phones have become natural crutches that we turn to, even when we don’t really need it for something functional. With our dependency on phones, we see a remarkable rise in our resistance to any ‘empty’ moment. Or, our resistance to boredom.

It is important to realize and acknowledge this, because boredom is how we get our fuel for creativity. It is when we get bored, stay with the discomfort of boredom and turn inward to address how we are feeling that we are truly mindful and aware of what is going on. But turning away from boredom by using our phones as a medium aborts that extremely important process.

With easy, continuous access to our phones, we have almost completely eliminated this opportunity. There are fewer moments of mindfulness and awareness with us being able to reach out to our phones even without moving.

Its Impact on our Productivity

  1. More reasons to procrastinate

    The worst enemy of productivity is procrastination. And our capacity to procrastinate is directly proportional to how many things there are to distract us from staying focused on the task at hand. With our phones, the distractions that we can delve into to procrastinate ‘just a little more’, are infinite. Delaying work becomes much easier when we have ready distractions to turn to.

  2. A loss of mindfulness

    As a result of screen addiction we miss out being present. We miss out on being in the nowThis lack of mindfulness hampers our productivity because we do the tasks we are assigned with just half a mind, and half a heart.

  3. Never enough time

    And going back to what we said at the beginning of this post – as a result of all the mindless hours we spend on our phones, we realize that the time has passed rather quickly and we haven’t gotten enough work done! This in turn plays a big role in influencing our self-esteem and self-worth.

The Good News

But the good news is, one can turn back and stop gadgets from controlling your life. You can reclaim all your time, and boost your productivity even if you have so far been a victim of screen addiction. Stay clued in for our next blog post in which we will tell you why it is so hard to break away from your screen, and how mindfulness can come to your rescue!

P.S. This series is inspired by the Calm Masterclass on Social Media and Screen Addiction by Dr. Adam Alter. Calm is a mindfulness and meditation app which offers guided and non-guided meditations. You can get it here.

Key Employee Engagement Strategies for Talent Retention

Key Employee Engagement Strategies for Talent Retention

For any business to be successful, it must have three things: a robust overall strategy, exceptional leaders, and engaged employees. This society has moved from an economy driven by the agricultural and manufacturing industries to a service oriented, personally connected economy.

One hundred years ago, employees were tasked with manual labor and had no vested interest in the business that employed them.

Today, with the demand for highly skilled talent, it is essential for employers and leaders to engage their employees and make them feel as if they are an integral part of the business.

In the past we wrote a blog post on employee engagement which was received with a lot of positive response by our readers – Five Must-Dos to Improve Employee Engagement – Transform the Zombies into Humans. We follow-up, with this guest post which analyzes employee engagement in a more recent context, and does so quite effectively.  John Hawthorne backs his insights with research on the key employee engagement strategies that stay relevant today.

Employee Engagement Most Recent Data

In 2017, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report revealed that only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their jobs – meaning that they are emotionally invested in committing their time, talent, and energy to adding value to their team and advancing the organization’s initiatives.

This means that the majority of employees show low overall engagement. Workplace productivity was low and employees and organizations are not keeping up with workplace demands fast enough.

More Gallup research shows that employee disengagement costs the United States upwards of $550 billion a year in lost productivity. As employee engagement strategies become more commonplace, there is an amazing opportunity for companies that learn to master the art of engagement.

Jacob Shriar, in a piece on OfficeVibe, tells us that

  • Disengaged employees cost organizations between $450 and $550 billion annually.
  • Highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability.
  • Highly engaged business units realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity.
  • Highly engaged business units achieve a 10% increase in customer ratings and a 20% increase in sales.
  •  Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202%.
  • Customer retention rates are 18% higher on average when employees are highly engaged.

These statistics are just the beginning of why employee engagement is so important.

Why Is Employee Engagement So Important?

The term “engagement” has been used so often and in so many different situations that it’s become hard to define. Many people think it means happiness or satisfaction, but it’s much more than that.

According to Gallup, who has been collecting and measuring employee engagement data for nearly 20 years: “Though there have been some slight ebbs and flows, less than one-third of U.S. employees have been engaged in their jobs and workplaces.”

Imagine if every employee was passionate about seeing the company and its customers succeed. The only true way to ensure that your customers are well taken care of is by taking care of your employees. This is known as the service-profit chain, a concept first introduced by Harvard Business Review in 1998. It’s still as relevant today as it was then.

Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees. Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.

The service-profit chain is the flow from the culture you create to the profits you generate and every step in between. The key is to start internally. When you create an environment where employees are happy, productive, autonomous, and passionate about what they do, they’ll provide better service to your customers.

That amazing service will create many loyal customers, leading to sustainable growth and profits. That’s why it’s important for every leader in an organization to understand the service-profit chain and how each step impacts the other.

Key Employee Engagement Strategies

Organizations need to pay attention to specific priorities to engage employees. Employees are more likely to become truly engaged and involved in their work if your workplace provides these factors.

Employee engagement must be a business strategy that focuses on finding engaged employees, then keeping the employee engaged throughout the whole employment relationship. Employee engagement must focus on business results. Employees are most engaged when they are accountable, and can see and measure the outcomes of their performance.

Employee engagement occurs when the goals of the business are aligned with the employee’s goals and how the employee spends his or her time.

The glue that holds the strategic objectives of the employee and the business together is frequent, effective communication that reaches and informs the employee at the level and practice of his or her job.

Engaged employees have the information that they need to understand exactly and precisely how what they do at work every day affects the company’s business goals and priorities. (These goals and measurements relate to the Human Resources department, but every department should have a set of metrics.)

Employee engagement exists when organizations are committed to management and leadership development in performance development plans that are performance-driven and provide clear succession plans.

When businesses actively pursue employee engagement through these factors, employee engagement soars to a ratio of 9:1 employees from 2:1 employees with concurrent improvements in the business success.

Employee Engagement Examples

There are of course many ways to show your employees they are valued, and to keep them focused and engaged on company success. According to Forbes, there are certain items in the benefit package that will help in creating employee engagement:

  • Health Insurance
  • Company Parties (social engagement)
  • Gifts (new babies, appreciation luncheons)

Employees go home to different roles–parent, caregiver to a loved one, a church or civic leader, spouse, bandmate, freelancer, artist, neighbor–and the people they are closest to impact their lives and perspectives about work in meaningful ways. Acknowledging those relationships and showing they are a priority will increase employee engagement.

How to Improve Employee Engagement

In a recent article in Forbes, Brent Gleeson, a former navy seal and successful businessman, gives solid advice on ways to improve employee engagement.

When managers are engaged, their team members can confidently state the following:

  • I know what is expected of me and my work quality.
  • I have the resources and training to thrive in my role.
  • I have the opportunity to do what I do best – every day.
  • I frequently receive recognition, praise and constructive criticism.
  • I trust my manager and believe they have my best interests in mind.
  • My voice is heard and valued.
  • I clearly understand the mission and purpose and how I contribute to each.
  • I have opportunities to learn and grow both personally and professionally.

The steps for improving engagement aren’t complex, they simply must be prioritized. This means engagement must be a core function of the manager’s role. The following steps can help the manager to accomplish this.

Step 1 – Put Everyone in the Right Role

Again, get the right people on the bus and make sure they are in the right roles. This means that all talent acquisition and retention strategies have to be aligned with meeting company goals.

Step 2 – Give Them the Training

No manager or leader can expect to build a culture of trust and accountability — and much less improve engagement —without setting the team up for success. This means providing the proper training and development while removing obstacles.

Step 3 – Task Meaningful Work

Engaged employees are doing meaningful work and have a clear understanding of how they contribute to the company’s mission, purpose and strategic objectives. Again, this is why they first have to be placed in the right role. I’ve made the mistake of hiring great talent just to get them in the door – but didn’t have a clear career path or role for them. If you don’t sort those details out quickly, they will leave.

Step 4 – Check in Often

The days of simply relying on mid-year reviews for providing feedback are long gone. Today’s workforce craves regular feedback — which of course leads to faster course correction and reduces waste. Use both formal and informal check-in strategies — and use them every week.

Step 5 – Frequently Discuss Engagement

Successful managers are transparent in their approach to improving engagement — they talk about it with their teams all the time. They hold “state of engagement” meetings and “engage” everyone in the discussion — and solutions.

Again, these principles are not complex, but must be prioritized. Companies that get this right will drive greater financial returns, surpass their competitors, and easily climb to the top of “the best places to work” lists.

Are Your Employees Engaged?

Employee engagement is critical to the success of any business. When a business has engaged and invested employees, it is in their best interest to protect the productivity and profitability of the business, and the image the business has in the community. Engagement also results in employee retention, which saves the business money in turnover and training. There is no downside to getting your employees engaged and invested in your business.

John Hawthorne is a health nut from Canada with a passion for travel and taking part in humanitarian efforts. His writing not only solves a creative need it has also lead to many new opportunities when traveling abroad. This article was originally published on Floship.com, you can read it here.

Acing Presentations: How to Answer Questions Like a Professional Speaker

Acing Presentations: How to Answer Questions Like a Professional Speaker

Communicate Effectively while Presenting

If you have followed our blog, you know we have always stressed on how important excellent communication skills is for a successful career. It is one skill that needs to be part of everyone’s “lifelong learning” lists as one that needs continual investment of time and efforts. In this guest post by Belle Balace, a growth specialist from Visme, we tackle a very important topic relevant to effective communication- how do you answer tough questions during a presentation. Read on to know more!
 
Giving presentations can be nerve-wracking. Even more so if you have to answer unforeseeable questions on the spot. You could be very well prepared and still encounter questions from your audience that you may not be able to answer!
 
Nervous? Well don’t be, there is no cause to panic! Thankfully, there’s a cheat sheet for this. Visme has listed in this info-graphic everything you need to know on how to deal with a potentially stressful situation on answering questions during a presentation.
 
 

About the author:

Belle Balace is a growth specialist in Visme, a one-stop visual online tool where anyone can create engaging presentations, infographics, and other types of visual content in no time.

Five Main Barriers to Effective Communication – What to Avoid to Get Heard

Five Main Barriers to Effective Communication – What to Avoid to Get Heard

A great deal of confusion and chaos can be avoided in the world of work, if ‘communication’ could be understood in all its elements, and not just as an isolated concept. Starting from writing emails, to delivering speeches, holding meetings and giving presentations, what is the one thing that they all have in common? No prizes for guessing – communication. Communication – both written and verbal is of prime essence in the world of work. It is the sole aspect which truly can make a difference – for the better, or for the worse – in any given situation. At OBOlinx, we are constantly brainstorming about how one can perceive communication in a better, more effective manner. While we have written extensively about communication skills, and also about how one can improve them, it made sense to think about the ‘elements’ of communication. Understanding the solution to any problem is effective only when we can look at the elementary aspects of the problem. Once we have broken it down, it becomes easier to address them. In this post we speak about the possible impediments (in a broad sense) to Effective Communication, and in the post which is to follow, we will address the critical aspects or elements for communication.

 The five main barriers to effective communication :

1. Language issues

This is one of the most basic hindrances to Effective Communication. While it really might seem most commonsensical to be wary of this error, it still may occur. Most commonly, this happens when you are not fluent, or comfortable in communicating (could be verbal or written), in the chosen language. This might also happen when, as a result of discomfort with the chosen language, you translate using your imagination of the language you are most comfortable with, or the language that you “think” in. In doing so, like most translations, the essence of what you are trying to communicate might be lost.

2. Lack of context/ clarity

Assuming that your audience is already familiar with what you are about to say/ write is another possible obstruction to Effective Communication. This assumption might lead to a lack of background. As a result, what you try to communicate might sound a bit out of context and there will be a visible lack of clarity. As a result, your communication will be hampered.

3. Distraction

The medium and time for communication is as important, as the purpose of the communication itself. This stands defeated if the communicator is unable to figure out whether the time and medium is appropriate and distraction free. Ensuring that the environment is distraction free will help you communicate more effectively. For example, if your audience is already engaged with a task, or if the set up chosen for the occasion is distracting in any way, it might be difficult to have the entire attention of your audience.

4. Confusion

This factor relates mostly to the ‘content’ of your communication, and is not very different from the above factor regarding clarity. How you communicate must be completely aligned with what you want to communicate. In case your communication is open to interpretation by your audience, it means that you weren’t very clear in what you wanted to communicate. This may occur in case of over-lap, lack of clarity or lack of context.

5. Being unnecessarily verbose

When wanting to communicate effectively, the purpose must be clear and the aim should be to establish the purpose as swiftly, and simply as possible. Being verbose/ using difficult jargon defeats the very aim of Effective Communication, as you cannot be sure about how much of the content is processed by your audience. Big and difficult words and sentences always confuse the audience. Keeping it sweet and simple is the best trick.

How does one tackle these five broad issues (there are many other issues which may be clubbed under these broad ones), in order to establish an effective pattern of communication? Watch out for our next post which speaks about this!