Before spending thousands on books and seminars about time management, it’s helpful to take a look at the factors that waste peoples’ time in the first place and leave them starved for time on other important tasks.
Watch to find out the top three factors that waste employee’s time.
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Video credit: Rumble
Here’s a list of three things that usually eat up a lot of the average worker’s time:
1 – Unnecessary commutes (13%)
According to the US Census Bureau, the average one-way commute is around 27 minutes which is almost six minutes more than it was in 1980. And that’s just average.
While there are jobs that necessitate having an employee on-site, nearly all office jobs can be done from home, so that’s 5.6 years’ worth of time that can be saved (assuming an average commute time accumulated by the time you retire).
2 – Useless meetings (16%)
An MIT study found that in an average worker’s 45-year career, 22 of those years will be spent in meetings with one-third of that time being unnecessary ones.
3 – Unneeded emails (23%)
An office worker usually reads and responds to about 200 emails a day, taking up 2.5 hours of their time. But 144 of those are not even relevant to their job.
Add all the above up and those avoidable tasks take up 51% of an average employee’s time. But there are some potential fixes in order to get the most out of an employee’s time.
1 – Introduce work-from-home initiatives.
Studies have shown that remote workers beat on-site workers in productivity even without taking into account the wasted commute time. The company also benefits by reducing the amount of floor space they need to rent or maintain.
2 – Be smarter about holding meetings
Things, like not meeting without an agenda or not letting the meeting run more than 30 minutes, will go a long way towards saving time. And instead of PowerPoints, employees can do a group reading of briefing documents instead.
3 – Rationalize the email system
Some ways include turning off emails during peak hours, limiting how many emails an employee can send each day or discouraging CC, BCC, and Reply All emails.
You would be surprised at how much time you can free up and also generate an environment that leads to better employee happiness and satisfaction.
Replaced!