And here’s the question: How much of an average employee’s average day is spent doing required activities that add absolutely no value to the company?
Now before you go searching through this article looking for detailed graphs and measures of statistical significance proving this point beyond doubt…there aren’t any. I’ll admit up front that my “research” is anecdotal. So if you’re a heady type who’s just finished a course in statistics you can write me off right here. On the other hand saying that most people spend at least a third of their day doing value-less work comes from my asking many hundreds of audiences this question over 30 years. For many in my audiences 33% was far too low an estimate. I remember one guy yelling out 80%!
I spoke at a major health care conference a short while ago and stayed on to hear a fellow named Aron Egner from The Advisory Board Company. These folks do very real and sophisticated research in hospital efficiency and effectiveness. One of their findings blew me away.
Guess how much of a nurse’s day is spent doing actual hands-on patient care? 26%! Two-six! One quarter of a shift! Flip that around and you conclude that 74% of her or his day is spent doing mostly paperwork and meeting other bureaucratic requirements. Get this - nurses spend over one hour a day standing around just waiting for things. Obviously not all of that paperwork and bureaucracy is unnecessary, but you can bet some of it is.
Why on earth would employers ask people to spend so much time doing useless things? And then pay them to do it! Some employees don’t care if what they do is adding value or not as long as they are getting paid. They’d read the phone book for eight hours if you paid them. But any employee with an IQ above a napkin finds this reality annoying and demeaning. It’s soul abuse.
First, let me challenge you to randomly select three days this month and ask various employees in different departments to do a detailed description of what they do on those days and how long it takes to do it. Be sure they know that it isn’t them being evaluated, it’s the system in which they work. In fact I’d go ahead and explain that the purpose of the exercise is to ensure that their work is meaningful, fulfilling and makes a difference. Call it the “Where Does the Time Go?” project.
Second, let’s look at why and how we create this wasteful situation, and then at what we can do.
Three ways we create this mess and what to do about it
1. It was a good idea at the time. It all starts innocently enough. No manager starts their day thinking ‘How can I make work as convoluted and pointless as I possible can?’ Okay, the person you’re thinking of may be the exception. Usually meaningless work starts with someone having an immediate need for an answer.
For example: someone responsible for Call Center staffing wonders how many customers order products on Fridays. No one really knows so Robert is asked to count them and send in a report by this time next month – which he does. Just to be sure the report is accurate or because he received accolades for doing it, he does it the following month as well. That was twelve years ago and he’s still doing the Friday Customer Order Report.
This is an example of an activity that was a good idea at some point in the past, but the point has long faded from relevance. When you examine where people are spending their time, look for regular activities (reports especially) that have been done for quite a while. Trace the history of that activity to how it all began and ask yourself if those conditions are still part of your current reality. If they are, then you need to evaluate the value of the activity further. If the original conditions have long gone, you can probably exile that activity to the nether land and make a lot of people very happy.
2. We like to see people busy. It’s called ‘make-work’ and we’ve all experienced it since we were youngsters. Because you were driving her nuts, your mother dumped all the buttons out of her button jar and challenged you to arrange them according to color. Many managers still do the corporate equivalent only the company now pays people to sort out the buttons. You know what they say about the devil and ‘idle hands’!
These activities are usually created in slow times – or in the early formation stages of a new enterprise when things haven’t quite got going. The truth is organizations have an obsession about looking busy. This is why you don’t ever see anyone just thinking. Thinking doesn’t look busy enough, certainly not as busy as counting buttons.
This idle work screams to be put out of its misery. If the ROI isn’t obvious, there probably isn’t any.
3. We focus on the process not the results. A lot of activities look like they might be useful and so we assume they are. That Quarterly Report you hate but have to write – surely that’s well worth the effort. Isn’t it?
A number of managers at a bank were whining about a report they had to produce, claiming that it had no value to anyone. That can’t be true, I said. So I started asking senior executives. One didn’t even know what report I was talking about. Another said that, no, he never read it and obviously never used it. In just a few minutes we banished it out of existence giving those managers approximately a day a quarter to do something useful.
Ask the recipients of the activity: Do you look forward to seeing the results of this work? Would you be inconvenienced or hindered in any way if this work were not done? Do you get much the same information in some other way? Is there any part of this work that is actually useful to you? What good does this work actually do? And then the best question of all: If you owned the company would you use your own money to pay for this activity?
Your life and the lives of your colleagues are precious and in all likelihood a non-renewable resource. Work consumes the majority of life so let’s be sure it makes a difference!
Wishing you peak purpose in everything you do,
Ian