Cluttered work environment leads to underperformance, say staff
Posted by: electrical-poster 13th November 2017
A cluttered desk and surrounding area is the reason why staff are unproductive in the workplace, nearly half of employees have said.
In an attempt to determine what elements distract workers from the job in hand, office power and ergonomic supplier CMD ran an independent survey asking 786 members of the public: What factors would negatively affect your performance at work?
‘Untidy Workstation’ and ‘Visual Untidiness (trailing wires etc)’ received 29.4% and 15.1% of the votes respectively. When combined, it shows that general ‘mess and clutter’ is the biggest distractor at work.
Power-related responses ‘Lack of available plug sockets near desk’ and ‘Lack of phone charging options near desk’ brought in a combined 18.9% of the answers — two areas that mattered most to the male respondents — with lack of chargers being of most significance to those in the 18-24 age bracket.
Both men and women were in equal agreement that ‘Insufficient lighting’ was detrimental to productivity, an answer that brought in the highest amount of individual votes (34.7%).
Bruce Cantrill, head of marketing and business development at CMD, said: “Integrating simple products into an office environment can make a huge difference to the productivity of staff, both in terms of speeding up simple essential tasks such as plugging in a device and also by ensuring that the office is uncluttered and not visually distracting.”
Insufficient lighting 34.7%
Untidy workstation 29.4%
Visual untidiness (trailing wires etc) 15.1%
Lack of available plug sockets near desk 11.5%
Lack of phone charging options near desk 7.4%
Other 1.9%
Source: The research was conducted online via Google Surveys in October 2017 and 786 people responded.
