How can you make 30 minutes equal 14 days?

How can you make 30 minutes = 14 days?

In 2019 the average employee worked 8.5 hours per day*. That amounted to 2,218.5 hours of work time (considering that there were 261 working days in 2019).

Of those 8.5 hours per day, the average employee only worked for 2 hours and 48 minutes*. Or roughly 730.8 hours (33%). This is a similar statistic to 2018.

If you could manage to squeeze an additional 30 minutes of work out of each employee, that would amount to approximately 14 days of work gain per year per employee.

For each 100 employees, you could gain back 11,900 hours of work time or roughly 1400 days for your corporation.

Ok so let's not pretend that we can wave a magic wand and make employees be productive for an additional 30 minutes per day (although if we could the math remains more or less consistent below). Let's instead imagine a scenario where we could make each employee 19% more productive during the 2 hours and 48 minute window that we have available such that we could "squeeze" another 30 minutes of productivity out.

How might IT help with that?

1) Business Analysts/Relationship Managers: Assist your people with ideal practices to fully utilize platform investments; optimize workflows and cut out wasted time; engage in process improvement lifecycles using basic Six Sigma or [insert your favorite PM model here] practices; Extend the tools you already have and get rid of the nasty overhead; stop sending attachments and instead share the links and invite people to your data.

2) Infrastructure & Data Managers: Create better dashboards; expand the performance of your equipment; eliminate passwords and redundant logins; eliminate the need for paper; provide better version history and file control management; stop sending attachments and instead share the links and invite people to your data.

3) Service and Support Managers: Train the people away from using attachments; use better cloud tools for collaboration and provide adequate support for them; provide better training and more streamlined support channels; empower the users to service issues themselves; stop sending attachments and instead share the links and invite people to your data.

4) Governance and Support Staffers: Train people how to use shortcuts; pivot to a proactive support model and get away from the reactive you are clinging to - trust me your metrics could be better; do not just rely on old safe models and instead embrace new technologies and innovative ways to solve problems; greenfield new ideas and bring in pilot groups; stop sending attachments and instead share the links and invite people to your data.

5) Everyone in the IT department: Stop standing guard over your little corner of IT and share what you know what the rest of your team - they can then share that information up and down the channels and get it to their customers; stop sending attachments and instead share the links and invite people to your data.

That's just a starting list...Of the 2 hours and 48 minutes each day that an employee is producing, how much of their time is spent clicking, searching, downloading, opening, editing, uploading, consolidating, waiting just to edit again all because IT is not playing a role in the bigger picture?

And I know you are shaking your head...Because of course YOU work more than 2 hours and 48 minutes each day - you were on Zoom for like 10 hours yesterday!! and like remember that time you spend almost an hour curating that perfect Zoom background? So you are an anomaly.

But, just for a second, ask yourself if there is something more you could be doing to sort of...speed things up a bit. You know, spread some of that secret knowledge you have and make your people more powerful than they are today. You may not notice it at first...but even showing that ONE person how to do that ONE shortcut and saving them ONE minute adds up significantly in the aggregate.

You got this.

*Bureau of Labor and Statistics: "Average Employee Work Day Statistics"