A survey by America Online and Salary.com found that:
- Human Resource Managers assume workers will waste time and figure that into their projections,
- workers admit to wasting twice as much time as HR Managers thought.
The estimated loss to American businesses:
$759 billion a year — nearly $6,000 per non-farm employee.
Yikes!
The biggest time-wasters are what you might expect: About 45% admit to wasting time on the internet; about a quarter to socializing with coworkers.
The top two excuses (by a wide margin) are less intuitive:
- A third say they don’t have enough work to do.
- Nearly a quarter believe they are underpaid.
Both of which seem to us like leadership issues.
- How do you figure capacity and compensation in your business model?
- How do you know your thinking is realistic?
- How would go about finding out if you’re leaving money on the table by under-employing some (or, heaven forbid, all) of your workers?
- If you find excess capacity, is there a way to channel it into an income stream — something more energizing than, If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean?
- If you can’t turn excess capacity to income, is there a way to turn it to staff development? Community service? Marketing? Research? Customer care? Innovation?
Let us know how you answer these questions…
Comment: (One)
Not a fair calculation
While it is entirely possible that 45% of workers waste time on the internet.
And it is also very likely waste way more time that managers expect.
But, it is not fair to say that this comes to the tune of $759 billion per year, and here’s why:
Many employees work on a salary (rather than hourly) basis. These employees are not hired to work a particular number of hours, but instead are to complete certain tasks.
Generally speaking, we all assume salaried workers work 8 hour days — and so, if someone wasted 2 hours a day, that would be 25% waste.
But this survey does not take into account how many extra hours are worked by the average salaried employee.
In addition, it presupposes that workers would be just as effective during the time they did work if they never wasted any time — a supposition that is probably untrue.
Also, if you want to dock employees for time spent surfing the internet at work, you should credit them for time spent working (or even checking work e-mail or voice-mail) at home and on weekends.
I’m not suggesting that time isn’t being wasted, or that it’s unimportant. Just that I don’t buy the $759 billion number.
What say you?
– Andrew