7 Tips to Combat With Wasting Time of Employees

wasting time GTD System

Wasting time on work was existed, exist and will exist in the future. But, you as an entrepreneur will need to find the ways how to maintain the amount of wasted time on the minimal possible level.

According to a study conducted by Atlassian, the average employee today receives 304 business emails on a weekly basis, checks his or her email 36 times in an hour, spends 16 minutes refocusing after handling incoming emails and loses 10 IQ points when fielding constant email, or the same as missing an entire night’s sleep. Also, their finding concludes that the most employees attend 62 meetings monthly and half of them are considered as time wasted. So, they spent 31 hours in unproductive meetings over a month.

CareerBuilder conducted a study on a representative sample of 2,138 hiring managers and human resource professionals, and a representative sample of 3,022 full-time, private sector workers across industries and company sizes. The biggest time wasters at work according to this research is cell phone/texting, then gossip and the internet and social media. They also include

Annual “Wasting Time at Work” survey of Salary.com for 2014 find that employees are spending longer periods than ever before in wasting time on the work. The numbers in their findings are the following:

  • 31% waste roughly 30 minutes daily
  • 31% waste roughly 1 hour daily
  • 16% waste roughly 2 hours daily
  • 6% waste roughly 3 hours daily
  • 2% waste roughly 4 hours daily
  • 2% waste 5 or more hours daily

As you can see from these numbers 26% of the people spent more than an hour on non-work-related tasks when they are at work.

YouGov study commissioned by Arvato UK find that nearly a quarter of UK workers check personal emails during meetings, and an average 29 percent regularly read or send personal SMS messages or use social media. Additionally, they find that almost half (45%) of workers experience delays due to IT issues.

How to Eliminate Wasting Time of Your Employees

Here are some things you can do when it comes to combat with the biggest time wasters. I don’t think here about persons as a time wasters, but I think about reasons for these time wasters.

1. Know the real numbers.

As a starting point to bring this global problem to your priority list, I recommend you to learn more about the numbers related to your employees. Here, I don’t think about the specific person in a specific workplace, but I think about each workplace. You need to know answers to several questions. How much they cost you? How much you paid them on an hourly rate? What you get from them translated into monetary value?

2. Talk to your employees.

You will always need to talk to your employees. It is not the idea for you to punish them because they are spending working time on their personal things. But, the idea is to explain to them that you know what they are doing, you are following their behavior and you are expecting their improvement.

3. Educate your employees about wasting time.

Use education as an additional strategy in combating with time wasters. It is better when your employees know what you are expecting from them, and they have the knowledge to achieve your expectation. So, education is the really important strategy for you.

4. Try having productive meetings.

If you want to run really productive meetings you will need to bring the right problems on the table that will be the subject of meeting discussion. In the same time, you will need to have a process of managing meeting that will enable that the discussion will be managed in the right direction.

5. Bring modern tools to help employees to deal with the biggest time wasters.

Having old technology as you can see can increase delays in the real productive work of your employees. On the other hand, you can find different tools that can help employees to short their time required to write emails or communicate through the internet. For example, TextExpander is the tool that really impacts on a time I spend on writing emails. And this is only one small part of what already exists on the market.

6. Create clear processes that can be followed by your employees.

One of the biggest resistance to change can be the implementation of new technology which needs new employee’s habits. The processes are important to help them implement changes that will save their time and your money.

7. Analyse how your employees spend their time when they are working.

This is important if you want to implement the right strategies in fighting with time wasters of your employees. You can simply use tools like RescueTime to track how your employees are spending their time when they work.