How Much Employee Time Is Wasted?

The problem of lost productivity:

Yes, a whopping 70% of American employees* do not feel they are engaged at work. That’s the majority of the workforce.

About 65% percent of employees reported that they use the internet during the workday for non-work purposes. Many admitted to trading stocks, watching sports, using company email for personal purposes, and shopping online. All of this adds up to a 40% loss of productivity for businesses.

Since The Workplace Research Foundation reported* that highly engaged employees were much more likely to have above-average productivity, to the tune of 38%, employee engagement is key.

What’s the answer in the office?

Are your organization’s processes unintentionally wasting employee time? A major contractor in San Francisco Bay area assembled its lower level project engineers to streamline the RFI process. The employees revealed they were spending 95% of their time at the computer redundantly entering data into seven different software systems. They redesigned the process to put solving the missing information issue first and then as much as possible documenting the solution in confirming RFI’s. They cut nearly 75% of the wasted time from their processes and significantly increased the response time between designers and the field.

Frustrated, less-engaged and less-productive employees were empowered to solve their own problems and did so.

Your employees can learn simple but powerful tools to Map and Improve Processes and even whole Value Streams – online in 3-9 minute videos.

What’s the answer in the field?

Handoffs are the biggest culprit. Face it handing off work between trades is clumsy and often unreliable.

Our scheduling processes – especially P6 and MS Project – are great for big picture stuff, but nearly unusable to detect, predict and prevent daily changes that affect handoffs.

Collaborative planning leading to trade-ownership of the 3-week to 6- week schedule can increase reliability of handoffs and work performed from the industry average of 54% to the 80%-90% for those teams using what is called the Last Planner System^®.