Wasting time at work

The 2007 Wasting Time Survey conducted by the good folks at salary.com has revealed that the average employee wastes around 20% of their work day. While the amount of wasted time has steadily declined over the past 3 years, companies are still paying billions in salaries for which they receive no direct benefit.

Employees do all sorts of things while on the job including personal internet use, socializing with coworkers and conducting personal business. I think to a degree, this should be expected as people have lives and are trying to balance everything so there is obviously no bad intent. And generally speaking, employees that are on salary do put in extra hours to get things done without being paid overtime so it all comes out in the wash.

But for companies with hourly employees, things might be different. You pay your employees for the hours they work; no more, no less. For companies that have a lot of hourly employees, time paid but not worked costs your business a lot more than you might think. In fact, not many companies actually know how much money is going out the door.  See if anybody in your company knows…

This is where a properly implemented workforce management solution can help. By tracking your employee’s time and automatically applying rules to determine things like grace allowances, etc. companies can pay their people for the actual time worked and also capture some actionable data that can be used to tune their payroll spend and help them improve their corporate performance.