1 Whole Work Week Wasted Each Year Due to Mobile Apps

How much time do you waste on your mobile phone’s applications on a regular basis? With so much entertainment and social media at your fingertips, it can be tempting to just forget about work for a bit and zone out to Candy Crush. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of employees have this mindset. The Nielsen Company made some shocking discoveries about how much time is wasted on mobile applications each month, and the results are disturbing.

In fact, the average person spends almost two whole days every month using their mobile device, be it a tablet or a smartphone. These statistics were taken using Nielsen’s mobile app tracking application, and takes advantage of data collected from the fourth quarter of 2014 from around 5,000 iOS and Android devices owned by users aged 18 or older.

As you can see, the average amount of time spent on smartphones has increased drastically in the past three years alone, and it can be expected to increase further in 2015. While the number of apps used to waste time haven’t necessarily increased or decreased, smartphone user lethargy can be expected to exceed 40 hours (a full work week for the average employee) in the next year.

So, what’s taking up all of this time? In first place is gaming applications, followed by music second and video applications in third.

Is there anything in particular you notice about these statistics? If anything, it should be the shocking lack of productivity applications. This means that smartphones are typically used as an entertainment device rather than a productivity device to the common user (which - hint hint - your employees are). As a business owner, you might feel that you waste more time in your email application than anything else; but for your employees, this might not be the case.

If your employees are wasting away this time in the office, you will see a drastic decrease in workplace productivity. That’s basically like paying someone’s salary for a week while they play games and waste time in the office; and that’s not okay. If your organization provides your employees with mobile devices for work around the clock, this is extra frustrating. After all, it’s like you are doing them a service to provide them with handheld entertainment.

If this is the case, you have the ability to block certain applications from these devices from connecting to your network. This is called whitelisting and blacklisting apps, and can be helpful not only for productivity, but also for enhancing corporate data security and minimizing data theft. Give us a call at (703) 821-8200 to learn more, and ask about our mobile device management and content filtering solutions.