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Productivity Killers

A new study on the productivity of the white collar workforce by training organization IBT-USA begs for commentary and further discussion. IBT-USA collected information over a five-year period on the work habits of over 1,000 employees at 30 companies.

Some key findings and what they mean:

* Time spent handling e-mail has increased 220% in the past four years and now averages 8.8 hours per week. I wish I spent 8.8 hours a week handling e-mail. In my case, the figure is at least 15 hours, possibly more. If I read every e-mail I got, it would likely be 30 hours per week.

* Working hours devoted to handling paper or snail mail is down 35%, to 1.3 hours per week. Unless you’re managing the mailroom, an employee who spends nearly an hour and half per week processing snail mail is low-hanging fruit when it comes to better productivity.

* Workers say their time spent attending ineffective meetings increased 300% to 2.1 hours per week. If you notice how hard it can be to schedule meetings with people inside and outside your company -- some of whom apparently spend anywhere from 20 to 30 hours per week in meetings -- I'd guess the actual figure is a lot higher than 2 hours per week. Rather than focus on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the meetings themselves, I think the focus should be on whether a given person needs to be in some meetings, or whether there's some other revenue-producing activity they can spend time on.

* The amount of time people spend "being interrupted" is up 37%, to 4.5 hours per week. There's two ways to look at this: people get interrupted, but could easily cut the interruptions short and trim that figure by a couple hours. However, those "interruptions" can also be viewed as personal interactions with coworkers, which pay dividends over time in team-building, collaboration and camaraderie.

* Time devoted to "looking for information" is up 13% to 1.7 hours per week. Weren't computers, networks, databases, business intelligence and other systems supposed to make this figure go down, not up? We may have an IT problem there.

* If you took a big chunk out of many unproductive functions (working on backlog, 3 hours per week; planning work, 2.2 hours; attending ineffective meetings, 2.1 hours), the amount of time spent "working overtime" (6.4 hours per week) could go away.

* In a somewhat oxymoronic finding, the average worker spends 3.5 hours per week "delegating work." Can it really consume 9% of the week having other people do work?

How do these data points map to your experiences in your company? Are e-mail, unproductive meetings and the search for information dragging your productivity down?

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