What activities come to your mind when you are looking to improve productivity with your team? Sickness? Long coffee breaks? Smoking breaks? Absenteeism on the day of major sports events?
But what about the time you spend looking for all your sales receipts at GST time? Or the time you spend rewriting a letter or report because you can’t find where you or someone else saved it on your computer system?
Has it ever occurred to you that this is another real cause of lost productivity?
This productivity loser is hidden or invisible because people look as if they are working as usual; they’re not missing from their desk or other place of work. And they are working as usual.
But – working as usual includes spending time looking for information they need to work effectively but can’t find readily. And because this is the way it’s always been, everyone tends to accept it as the normal way to work.
Research has shown that people can spend up to 30 minutes a day looking for information that can’t be found easily.
Wow – just think about what that does to productivity in your business – time that could be spent on more valuable work that would add to your bottom line not subtract from it.
But that doesn’t happen in your business, you say?
Let’s look at it a different way
Analysis of the research findings indicates that the average person spends 10 minutes searching for a single piece of information. This might be sales receipts, supplier contact details (where’s that business card?), a monthly sales report.
On average this will happen 3 times a day.
10 minutes x 3 times a day = 30 minutes of unproductive time per person
½ hour x 5 days = 2½ hours per week
2½ hours per week x 48 working weeks = 120 hours (15 days) per year – per person
Now let’s put some dollars into the mix
For someone on $30,000 a year, this works out to more than $1,200 wasted each year.
For someone on $70,000 that’s almost $6,000 per year.
And add in more people – let’s say 5 staff
Five people each on a salary of $30,000 will cost you more than $6,000 a year by wasting valuable time looking for pieces of information.
That’s 4% of your costs for those people each year! Can you really afford to throw away that much money each year? What else could they do with that time?
You can download this spreadsheet and plug in your own figures for your business to see how much invisible productivity wastage you have in your business.
Next week I’ll have some hints and tips for how you can reduce this wastage in your business.