Employees waste 18% of every day on unproductive tasks: Report

Pull out your growth wish lists – a productivity expert says SMEs can make serious inroads on their dusty growth dreams if they can halve the amount of time employees spend on wasteful activities every day.

The Ernst & Young Australian Productivity Pulse, which is based on a survey of 2,500 employees in sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and construction, finds that employees spend 58% of their time on work that has “real value” and 24% of networking and professional development, such as social media. That suggests 18% of time is “wasted”.

The accounting giant says based on the annual wage bill in Australia of about $606 billion, total organisational productivity wastage can therefore be valued at $109 billion per annum, or $320 million per day.

Ernst & Young advisory leader Neil Plumridge says “every company has a list of things they’d like to do, but don’t have the capacity to do.”

“If you could eliminate half of those wasteful activities, the value-creation would be huge.”

Plumridge says Ernst & Young finds that “meaningless work” fits into three buckets:

1) Internal administration, red tape and meetings.
2) Waiting for IT systems.
3) Instances where jobs needs to be redone.

The survey also found that 62% of respondents said their organisation was operating efficiently, and 71% were motivated to do their job to the best of their ability.

But one-third of respondents said they were looking for a new job and complained their skills were not being utilised.

“In a tight labour market, what you’ve got is a third of workers looking for a job; they’re saying their employers are not keeping them interested,” Plumridge says.

He says companies should work towards eliminating ‘valueless’ work and instead redirect employees’ time into growth and innovation.

Plumridge says small business often struggle to maintain their levels of communication – and therefore employee contentment – as they grow.

“Companies that have good levels of engagement are the higher performing companies,” Plumridge says.

“And often with a small business, you don’t use words like leadership because it’s a flat structure and the communication is easy and the entrepreneurial spirit comes alive.”

“But as the organisation gets larger, the communication slows down and the message gets lost – and that’s where the lack of confidence comes through.”

The respondents also said that the biggest factors on productivity were people management (54%), organisation process (23%), innovation (15%) and technology (8%).