Those at-work leisure minutes can add up to a lot

Mr. CEO, I think you’re going to be shocked by this …” After his quizzical stare, I proceeded, “It takes your company 30 hours to do one-hour worth of work.” “What?” he snapped at me in disbelief. “Explain to me how this is possible.”

Unfortunately, what I shared with him confirmed a hunch he had, but a hunch that he didn’t want to be true. His company isn’t as productive as it should be. And neither is yours. Let me explain why this bold statement is true. The most important contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. (Productivity being measured as the labour output per hour: the total number of units produced per year divided by the total number of hours worked, including everyone’s — support functions, sales, management, etc — hours and not just the workers).

Productivity grew steadily at the compounded rate of 3 per cent per annum over the century. All of the economic and social gains of the 20th century rests on this achievement.

That has all changed and productivity growth has been on a decline since the late 1990s and is now less than half (1.3 per cent) of what it was in the previous century. The decline started with the rise of the knowledge worker era when it was believed employees could manage their time well, which they don’t.

Before the actual productivity shift and decline of the past two decades, Peter Drucker said, “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker.”

It was believed that autonomy for the worker would increase productivity, yet in reality the exact opposite has proven true. As a result, we have the exact problem that Drucker foresaw. We consulted three different productivity studies (all employee self-reports) to see how significant this issue is. The result is employees saying they’re only productive 36, 45 and 62 per cent of the time.

If you take the best of these and translate the unproductive hours into an FTE (full-time employee equivalent), it means that 38 out of every 100 employees are unproductive. Using the other sources, the impact is far more alarming.

The impact of this on the balance sheet is significant and should not be left unaddressed. This is what caught the CEO’s attention.

In addition to asking, “If you had to state a figure, how long do you think you spend productively working during work hours on a daily basis?”, one of the surveys asked, “‘What are you guilty of spending time doing during the working day rather than working productively?’” The top 10 unproductive activities are: 1. Checking social media — 47 per cent of respondents (44 minutes, spent doing this during working day).

2. Reading news websites — 45 per cent of respondents (one hour and five minutes).

3. Discussing out-of-work activities with colleagues — 38 per cent of respondents (40 minutes).

4. Making hot drinks — 31 per cent of respondents (17 minutes). 5. Smoking breaks — 28 per cent (23 minutes). 6. Texting and instant messaging — 27 per cent of respondents (14 minutes).

7. Eating snacks — 25 per cent of respondents (eight minutes).

8. Making food in the office — 24 per cent of respondents (seven minutes).

9. Making calls to partners and friends — 24 per cent of respondents (18 minutes).

10. Searching for new jobs — 19 per cent of respondents (26 minutes).

Can you imagine that one-fifth of your workforce is spending half an hour per day (while on the clock) looking for a new job? In addition to employees wasting their own time, organisations waste the hours worked by slow decision-making, working on unproductive actions/tasks, working too slowly or the wrong way, and attending useless meetings. It not a surprise that time lost is the primary contributor to productivity loss at the corporate level as this is also the same contributor on the personal level. Control (specifically, self-control) is the skill that unleashes massive productivity by keeping you focused and on track. This is the path to maximising time. Unfortunately, self-control is a difficult skill to rely on. Self-control is so fleeting for most people that when Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania surveyed two million people and asked them to rank their strengths in 24 different skills, self-control ended up in the very bottom slot.

To increase productivity in the knowledge worker era and get more output per hour worked, you need to employ the same practice that was used in the 20th century.

Productivity comes from making sure everyone is doing the right thing, the right way, at the right time. That’s how productivity increased fifty-fold the 20th century. We need to mimic this in the knowledge worker era. Get your stopwatch out and count the hours to make them count.