Losing Productivity Is Easy

Work at ACME Company in the staff offices?  Here’s your leadership and sales staff.

These 9 staff employees, plus another 17 hardworking people in the back, gives you a total of 26 employees. Your sales are $2,99,000 per year. You are looking for new sales, additional profits, lower expenses, a few good employees and some aggressive expense management, like most of us. No matter what… you need more productivity.

Remember you have 7 staffers who are always using the computers… It’s part of their job. We conclude the plant supervisors do not. They are more hands on and will be ignored. Now, look at the data below. Organizations who study email (Tech Jury was used for this example) at work.

This shows conservatively staffers see an average of 120 emails per day at work. 50% are spam Hey, time yourself. Look at all the things you do like read, copy, cut and paste, forward, file work, attachments and compose emails.  

In our example spam takes a scant 12 seconds to read and destroy. I assumed 5% of the emails are important and worth 300 seconds of reading and involvement, 15% are modestly important and are worth 120 seconds of reading and involvement and 30% are not very important and are worth a mere 40 seconds of reading and involvement.  On that basis each of your 7 person staff is spending 425 hours on email. We assume the supervisors do not use emails. However, for those that are spending 20% of their productive time – On Email?  If I’m half wrong its 212 hours.

Acme has a lean an ultra-lean staff of only 7 people wearing multiple hats. But they are trapped into an activity that is costing the business $164,000 in lost productivity. Are you kidding me? Again, if I’m half wrong we are still talking big numbers.

What can you do to cut down on emails and other nonproductive administrative activities? Let’s start small. Start looking for time lost. It’s easy to find… if you look. But, be mindful that little activities add up fast. For example, according to Buzzfeed, the average smartphone user checks Facebook 14 times a day. (Daily Mail Scientific Survey.) According to the https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/ each employee in the company is getting 89.4 robocalls. Now, tell me you are interested in hearing a few ways to eliminate emails and other ways to waste time. Good. Call me. I might give you a few. One has to do with your cell phone policy.

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