WASTED TIME AT WORK

A new study by academics from an Enterprise Partnership between Maryland and Delaware Universities has sought to quantify the total amount of time people waste in the workplace.?

By conducting a time-use survey of 5,000 office workers in America and Britain, the researchers at Maryland and Delaware universities quantified the?minutes that people waste on pointless activities each working day. (Meetings are excluded: they often turn out to be useless but not always.)?

The authors then extrapolated these figures to come up with a “Weighted Total Futility”, providing the very appropriate acronym of WTF (!), which quantifies the lifetime estimate of time wasted.?

The results are alarming.

You might think that the time wasting culprits would be things like setting colleagues' staplers in jelly (Recall The Office) but alas, it is nothing so funny and frivolous. First on the list is slightly contentious - it relates to the correction of spelling and grammar mistakes in the content we produce. We take 20 minutes on this per day or 180 days over a 45 year career but labelling this as 'wasted time' seems harsh. Surely, it is vitally important that we make the content we produce clear and unambiguous?

However, second on the list of sources of workplace time wasted is logging in: - the dreaded password.?

We spend a massive 145 days or 5 months of our working life either logging into things or maintaining our secure access to applications (password changes, resets and the associated user support).

To put this in context, in 2019 Mark Beaumont circumnavigated the globe by bicycle in 78 days and 14 hours. So in the time taken up by signing into things at work, Mark could nearly have cycled around the world TWICE!

The research found that we spend a truly eye-watering 16 minutes every working day trying to log into applications or manage the security or validity of our authentication processes.?The total cash cost of those 16 minutes is staggering. For the average UK office worker paid ￡23,328 per year, the cost after employer costs equates to ￡1,010 per employee per year!!

Moreover, it’s even worse if you take account of the opportunity cost in lost billable time in professional service organisations.?

Quite literally months of our lives are wasted trying to remember passwords, find a mobile phone, wait for codes, look for dongles, download apps, take a selfie or re-enter and update wrongly entered credentials. Significantly, just as much time is also spent waiting for something to happen, typically because of slow delivery of one-time codes, clunky machine to machine authentication or server latency.

This represents a soul-destroying duration of people just vacantly staring at their screens.

It is precisely for this reason that at MIRACL we created our Cost Saving Calculator, which helps organisations quantify the value of their employees' time which is lost to arduous and clunky authentication. Check it out here.

The fact is that the need for security should not longer carry the price of poor user experience. Increasing security by simply adding another required process in users' paths is crude, archaic and results in very little incremental security.

Modern cryptography can enable a full Multi-Factor Authentication in seconds, even in the browser - as this video shows. So you and everyone else should feel entitled to having back pretty much all of the 145 days you previously lost to logging in.

As to whether you'll be able to cycle around the world in that time - let alone twice, well that's another question...