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For Canadians, productivity and wellbeing go hand-in-hand

If you're not taking care of yourself, you're not going to be productive. (Getty)
If you’re not taking care of yourself, you’re not going to be productive. (Getty)

Nearly half of Canadians are struggling with productivity and feel they could be getting more done while at work according to a poll released this week by payroll services provider ADP.

Distraction sat at the top of the list, with 40 per cent of the more than 1,500 employees polled saying it hindered their productivity.

“We call it the distraction deluge,” says Russell Wong, chief financial officer at ADP Canada. “People have an issue with concentrating (as) a result of poor office design, chatty co-workers, wasting time on social networking sites.”

Over 30 per cent cited archaic internal processes or cumbersome workflows creating bottlenecks and slowing down their ability to accomplish all their work.

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“That was a consistent (sentiment) across the respondents, whether it was the age, region, gender or even level of education,” Wong pointed out. Another key productivity dampener was complacency, with 27 per cent saying they they didn’t really need to work more efficiently to get the job done. “That is something employers need to take a look at and figure out how to address.”

Aside from those three, Canadians also found that a lack of resources or tools, a growing boredom with their job, an overwhelming amount of work and shortcomings in training also brought their productivity down.

Despite being only a small sample of Canadians’ sentiments, the survey provides an interesting look at a small aspect of Canadians work lives at a time when wellbeing in the country is falling out of step with the economies growth.

According to a study Canadian Index of Wellbeing researcher at the University of Waterloo released this week, the country’s gross domestic product grew 38 per cent between 1994 and 2014 while wellbeing edged up just shy of 10 per cent.

Canadians are spending more time commuting to their jobs, up from around 40 minutes on average in 1994 to an hour in 2014, which amounts to about two weeks of lost free time in a given year. While flex-hours are becoming more commonplace, Wong points out that ADP has implemented its own system to allow employees to work in the environment that suits them best, the wellbeing index found that more Canadians are working on evening and weekends or rotating schedules.

There are some correlations between wellbeing and productivity, especially for employees who feel complacent. A lot of that complacency stems from employees losing sight of the organization’s goals and objectives, explains Wong. In other words, Canadians are forgetting why they even started working at their job in the first place.

“If you don’t have a clear purpose and don’t understand how you connect and are of value to the business and the customers then that can effect wellbeing,” he says, which ties hand-in-hand with productivity. Where it’s not complacency it can be overwhelming workloads.

“As people get tired and their energy level goes down that absolutely impacts their productivity,” adds Wong. But both the employers and employees share the responsibility in curbing these productivity killers.

“It relates back to understanding your goals objectives and prioritizing and I think employees have to be able to do that,” he says. “And the employers also have to recognize that if you overwork your employees, they’re going to get sick, take time off and their productivity is going down and (eventually) they’re going to leave.”