Sunday, September 09, 2012
All The Ways Your Company Is Killing Productivity At Work
thegrindstone.com: According to this awesome new infographic from Atlassian, you can see exactly all the ways your employees are wasting time. Too much email, pointless meetings and interruptions by fellow workers are the main culprits. Pointless emails waste time but it seems that those meetings you have everyday are the real killers. On average, an employee attends 62 meetings each month and considers half of them as time wasted. That’s 31 hours, or three quarters of a work week, spent in unproductive meetings each month.
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9 comments:
This article hits the nail on the head, however I wish it would have stated ways of increasing productivity also. This summer when I worked on our Crop Over festival (concerts, street carnival) I had meetings about 3/4 times a week. There was one weekly Tuesday meeting which would be from 9 am - 1 or 2 pm. This was 4/5 hours of wasted time. I spent about 10-15 minutes of that meeting doing an update on my event and the other 4 hrs and 45 minutes doing other work, fishing around on Facebook or trying my hardest to stay awake.
Some companies need to take the time to analyse their procedures to ensure the maximum usage of their employees time.
AHHHH finally! This is so true! I feel that in most meetings there is either so much information that I am overwhelmed or there is so little that I don't really think about it and zone out. The other thing they mention is constant interruption which for me is a really a constant drain because your brain has to keep switching what it is doing and can never focus on extremely productive work. Also if someone is interrupting you they are probably about to give you more work or ask you a question that will lead to more work for you. Every phone call and stop by the desk is probably someone else wanting something from you and adding to your work load making you feel overwhelmed and getting distracted from the work you are currently doing.
Something that I've really started to wonder about large companies is why they haven't banned personal cellphones in the office. I know one or two people that work in an office in which their cellphone must be turned off during their day while in the building, and they seem much happier to be free of the temptation to check facebook, tweet, or what have you.
Being able to get into a working mood, which takes some people longer than others, is paramount to having a productive day, which seems to be the point of the info-graphic. Without meetings happening right in the middle of the day, without constantly wanting to check up on your fantasy football team or make plans for the upcoming weekend, everyone would be more productive. And maybe a bit happier too, if the meeting section is any indication.
I dont think there is one thing in this info graphic that anyone can disagree with. Email, meetings, and being interrupted, everything that has happened to me and destroyed my productivity. One thing I think we do ok with here is production meetings, once a week, short and sweet. Yes, some of us have to go to maybe 3 in a row, but compared to other places its in and out. Email is the absolute worse. Poorly written emails, verbose emails, or many emails about the same thing with one piece of information are the worst. I find it better to wait and send an email. A couple hours later could mean one email with short, concise information rather then many emails and questions in response. Its all really a matter of thinking before acting.
I think this article raises good points, but what is the next step? The article only talks about the problem, but no solutions are offered. Should there be less meetings? Should people just be more cognizant of these elements during their work weeks in hopes that everyone can work towards a greater goal of increasing productivity in the work place? If there were some pointers about what to do about these problems, this article would be much more useful.
I disagree with Sophia's point. I think identifying problems is the first step towards a solution and one of the hardest steps in that process. Once goals have been identified, it then comes down to identifying the problems that are impeding these goals, and from there, designing solutions.
This article does a great job of showing a range of possible problems that can impede a workplace from achieving optimal efficiency. It is then up to us to ask which of these problems are true for my organization, and from there, diagnose to the root cause followed by a clever and creative design. I think that if we follow this process, this article is immensely beneficial and provides great value. Of course the question is, is anyone up to investing their time at coming up with a new design.
I like this article, though I think the title is somewhat misleading. It's not the company killing the productivity in many cases- its the personal work habits of the employee. I agree, companies that have "too many meetings" or send "too much useless e-mail" have issues. But a lot of that, and a lot of the distraction over e-mail, can be solved with good work habits such as e-mail management, planning your time a bit better, and removing distractions (I suggest Randy Pauch's time management video).
There are of course exceptions to this: I spent my summer working in an office where the job is interruptions. We were supposed to respond directly to people's needs, and a lot of the time sat there waiting for people to come to us with interruptions.
I think it really hits home since they quantify all the time wasted with how much money each culprit is costing the company. It's really easy to sit here and say employees waste time at work... we all know that it is easy to get distracted and lose track of time. But to state how much money it is actually wasting allows you to put it into a different perspective. I also agree with the others here, it would have been a much more comprehensive article if they would have stated ideas to get around all this time and money we waste.
If i had a traditional 8-5 business day job, the more miserable the working conditions, the worse of a job I would probably do. If you wasted my time, I would probably waste your time. If a company sees that meetings are wasting time, and they make an effort to increase efficiency in the workplace... the trickle down effect would impact me as an employee of that corporation. A company that is okay with being stagnant then... so are my work efforts. When I am under the direction of a leader who is pressing forward always... my work is better. This is a great tool for companies to use to increase efficiency in the work place.
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