At one time executives were concerned about employees using the organization’s telephone system for personal calls except when absolutely necessary. They wondered how many pencils were being used for personal use. They were also concerned about the time spent by the water cooler before the days of multiple side-by-side food dispensers. Today’s executives are concerned about the amount of organizational time spent on personal e-mail and Web searches. Studies show that an average of one hour per day is lost on personal e-mails or personal Internet use. Whether it’s an hour or a half-hour per day is irrelevant; it’s lost time, and when multiplied by the number of employees, the figure takes on real significance. Can you imagine an organization of 10,000 people losing 10,000 working hours per day? It happens very easily.
Everyone in the organization fritters time away, starting right at the top. We will never achieve 100 percent utilization of our time. No one can be productive for 480 minutes in a 480-minute day. There’s a certain amount of socialization that is essential, even though it doesn’t directly add to productivity. Much of the frittered-away time is due to lack of discipline, but discipline is not defined as conformance, strictness, punishment, or being tough or mean. Discipline involves a balance of order and freedom to act; it establishes limits of acceptable performance and provides for continuous improvement; it engenders an environment and a spirit where personal commitments will be met; it allows no excuses.
Those directives coming from the top of the pyramid and from all functional executives can either improve performance or hinder it. Too often these requests generate make-work without any possibility of improving performance. They usually occur when some guru or academic develops a new program that will take the organization "to the next level." Unfortunately focusing solely on such issues as empowerment, reengineering the organization, participative management, and all the other single-issue fads doesn’t guarantee success.
Those routine reports demanded by all levels consume inordinate amounts of time. Many are seldom read and generally end up in some archive. As a manager you will most likely be expected to provide inputs to your own manager. You do have an opportunity to either eliminate those reports totally or restructure them so they don’t require as much effort. It may take some selling skills but it’s your department that’s frittering away the time.
In my first supervisory position, managing fourteen engineers, I found that there was too much time spent writing monthly reports on every project. There were eight supervisors reporting to one manager, and the complete department included about 150 engineers, designers, and draftsmen. The eight supervisors provided special high-technology engineering services to about thirty other managers. Keep in mind this was when personal computers with Microsoft Word were only a dream, so every report had to be typed. I approached my manager, who was one of about fifteen managers reporting to the director of engineering, and suggested that we provide formal monthly reports only for projects over a certain value. This would eliminate about 85 percent of the effort being devoted to generating reports. I was told that this was impossible. I continued to raise the issue at our monthly meetings, and my manager finally agreed that we could try it.
So we stopped the formal reporting procedure on all projects below a certain dollar amount. We heard no comment from the thirty managers that we served. Eight months later the director of engineering approached my manager and said he had not received the monthly department report. The manager politely informed him that we discontinued it eight months ago. The director responded with a few very unpleasant words but that was the end of the small project report. How many hours had been wasted over the years to write and distribute those reports that nobody read or at least found essential for meeting their objectives?