Top Management Story

Writen by Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Time management is still one of the most frequently searched times as a solution to improved performance. A Google search (September 2006) indicates 19,200,000 hits. There appears to be a lot of individuals seeking answers from training such as workshops to purchasing tools such as PDA's in their ongoing quest to improve performance specific to this limited, fixed, constant.

During the last 10 years in my performance improvement and executive coaching work, I have consistently asked the following simple question to even the busiest of CEO's, entrepreneurs, small business owners, executives and front line employees: Do you waste 12 minutes a day What is surprising is the consistency of the answer at all levels: Yes! This consistency suggests that individuals at all levels need to better self-manage their activities so that they can achieve the results being demanded of them.

Businesses understand the economic impact of wasted time. Those 12 wasted minutes each day translate into 1 hour per week or 52 hours per week. Using an average salary (without benefits) of $30,000 amounts to a minimum annual loss of $576.92 per employee. Since most organizations in this country are considered to be small businesses with less than 500 employees, then using 100 employees creates a negative impact of loss profits and productivity or performance of $57,692 for just wages alone.

However, wasted time is not just a performance problem such as the lack of personal self-management, but also can be a greater symptom of significant organizational leadership issues. The question needs to be asked: Why is there wasted time? In many cases, the wasted time can be a direct result of some of the following leadership problems:

• Lack of organizational direction from not knowing what to do next to not knowing the overall business goals
• Micro management that is waiting for leadership approval to proceed
• Poor interpersonal skills from communication to poor decision making and problem solving skills
• Poor processes, policies and procedures
• Accountability (Disconnect between performance and results)

Now, let's assess a dollar impact to each of these problems facing the employees. For 100 employees who have had one of these problems each and every workday is $100 per day. This $100 daily loss grows to $26,000 annually. When combined with the loss wages, the hit to the bottom line is almost $100,000. If the company has 250 employees, this loss of wages and performance would increase to over $200,00. A company of 500 employees would experience a potential profit loss of over $410,000.

A recent national survey by Salary.com suggests that most employees waste 2 hours each day not just 12 minutes. Also, many employees face more than one problem each day. These facts suggest that poor time management potentially contributes to far greater loss of profits than the $100,00 to $400,000 as previously computed.

To reverse this drain on the profits requires management to truly assess their problems and change their beliefs that time management is just a "personnel" issue, but instead is an organizational issue that demands effective leadership.