There are a lot of distractions in today’s world. Wherever you go, it seems people are always distracted and looking down at their phones. The rest of the world seems to not exist to them.

While this can be annoying enough in public, in the workplace, this behavior can have much more serious consequences. Distracted employees are not productive employees. Their distractions mean wasted time, and that means wasted money. The company’s bottom line could suffer as a result. Thankfully, there are strategies you can use to solve this problem. Below are five workplace distractions you can easily eliminate.

Smart Phones

The number one source of distraction both in the workplace and pretty much everywhere is the smart phone. While BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, policies have some merit, they’re not appropriate for every workplace. It may be a better idea to forbid their use entirely while on the clock.

The World Wide Web

Internet access in general is also a problem. Even if you ban smart phone use, employees may still waste a lot of time browsing the web and checking for social media updates on company computers. You can solve this problem by informing employees that their internet use is closely monitored.

Gossip

Office gossip is something else that plagues many workplaces. It can have disastrous results too. Employees may divide into different camps that hate each other, and the entire workplace can become toxic. Although you may not be able to stop employees from talking to each other, make sure they know gossip is strongly discouraged.

Noise

The open office was a fad. In actuality, it has been shown to harm worker productivity. One of the reasons why is that it’s hard to get away from all the noise created by other employees in an open office. Overall, cubicles are a vastly superior option that boost efficiency and results.

Comfort

It’s hard to focus on the task at hand if you have basic needs that are not being met. This can be being late to lunch, not taking breaks, having the office be too hot and uncomfortable. Many offices have a broken heater or air conditioner that affects workers productivity. It’s better for the bottom line to repair commercial air conditioners than to have the noise or heat destroy your electronics and productivity.

Meetings

Meetings are thought of as a necessity for offices. Instead, they can simply waste a lot of time and act as distractions to real work that needs to be done. While you may not want to do away with meetings all together, you can try to minimize meeting bloat. Keep them short, to the point and few and far between.

As with the rest of people’s lives in the modern world, there can be distractions in the workplace. Do what you can to remove these from your employees’ work space. This will help to increase their efficiency and your bottom line as well.