This post is contributed by Jason Dirkham.
Wasted labor hours are a common problem for many businesses, especially in the service sector or jobs requiring continual repetitive upkeep of digital tasks. These lost hours can also occur when employees need to perform productive tasks, such as waiting for customers, idle chatting, or doing personal activities. Does that mean your employee has to be working at 100% volume from minute one of entering your building or logging on at the office? Of course not. But it’s important to note that realistically, wasted time can have a negative impact on your business’s profitability, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
If you avoid blaming your people and focus on systems, you may achieve a compounding benefit for your business. For example, if you reduce wasted labor hours by 10% in one month, you will save money on wages and improve your productivity, quality, and reputation which stacks for the next month. This will lead to more customers, more revenue, and more growth, and it all feeds into one another for the better. It will at least help you avoid compounding difficulty from its opposite.
In this post, we will show you how to identify the sources of wasted labor hours in your business, and how to implement effective strategies to reduce them – without necessarily cutting costs with a sharp tool or indiscriminately ruining your systems.
Consider A Time Audit
One of the best ways to measure wasted labor hours in your business is to process a thorough time audit. This is a process of gentle tracking and analyzing how you and your employees spend your time during work hours. That might identify the tasks that are taking up the most time, the tasks that are not adding value to your business, and the tasks that can be delegated, outsourced, or eliminated.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that your receptionist has to manually implement data entry when a bespoke software could do that for you, or maybe you could benefit from NDIS software to save time. This can also help you uncover the hidden sources of wasted labor hours, such as interruptions, distractions, procrastination, or multitasking – perhaps it’s just that your local lunch line for the street food vendor is so long, staff can’t enjoy their lunch and feel well rested when they return. You might work out a deal to conduct lunch early or even pay for a sandwich delivery service staff can opt into each day. After all, if you’re going to solve a problem, you need to know where it’s going.
Delegate Responsibilities Effectively
Delegating in this context means giving some of your tasks to other people who can do them better or faster than you – it’s okay to admit you’re not a super boss when you have a business to run as well. Delegating can help you free up your time for more important or strategic tasks, and also empower your employees to take ownership and responsibility for their work, which is inherently motivational.
However, remember that delegating is not as simple as dumping your work on someone else. You need to delegate the right tasks to the right people and provide them with clear instructions and feedback if they should adapt correctly to the task. However, if you can do this, you end up avoiding wasted hours by simply managing your people better and making sure dead time or unattended to tasks is less common.
For example, if you’re a restaurant manager, you can delegate the task of ordering supplies to your assistant manager, who has more experience and knowledge of the inventory, preventing you from having to recheck every day just because you’re more comfortable doing the accounts. Over time, this approach helps a great deal.
Survey Staff About Their Major Workday Gripes
You can also cut down on wasted labor hours by asking your staff what bugs them the most at work. These are the things that make them unhappy, stressed, or distracted during their work hours – and trust us, every employee has these no matter how good the workplace is or how satisfied they are, it’s just human nature. The issues, fortunately, can be quite revealing. They could be about the work environment, tasks, working relationships, or certain policies holding them up in need of review.
When you ask your staff anonymously, you can find out what these things are, and how they affect their work and mood over time. For example, if your staff say they feel like communication is good but the same points are repeated over and over in briefings, you can look at how you structure emails, tasks and verifications from each individual before letting them work. Can be a valuable insight into how exactly you work and why your approach is worth altering.
Outsourcing Can Speed Vital Tasks Up, Too
There’s a great measure to help you completely cut the drudgery or repetitiveness out of tasks your systems aren’t designed to continually achieve, and it’s called outsourcing your tasks to other pros or agencies. Outsourcing can save you time and money on tasks that are not your specialty, or that need special skills or equipment. While you know a great deal about your business, maybe working with a copywriter is a much better solution for engineering a better website and descriptive content, helping you avoid worrying over the wording or SEO compliance.
But outsourcing is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it’s important to remember that. You need to pick the right tasks and the right people to outsource to and keep an eye on them and what they do. This way, you can compliment your firm’s approach. To use an example, a graphic designer can outsource the writing for your website or brochure to a freelance writer, who can whip up a catchy brief in line with your project. Don’t think this is lazy, firms work with B2B connections all the time, and having that in place prevents wasted hours that were never spent in the first place. We’d recommend assessing the cost of a saved internal hour over a paid external hour. You might be surprised.
Rebalance Your Departments
A common problem for modern businesses is that while the staff may be a credit to the business, it’s not always that they occupy the right positions, places, or departments. It’s not unusual for an excellent department to be understaffed completely, leading to many tasks going unworked until the last minute, or calling staff for overtime on a continual basis.
Rebalancing your departments from time to time, reassessing where the skills gaps are, and hiring as appropriate with your turnover is key. You can also make certain to promote and hire internally so those who can use their experience and optimize your systems will always have a place in your firm is worthwhile. If you can focus on that end result, odds are you’re going to implement a helpful counterpoint to any drudgery or difficulty you’ve found thus far.
To conclude, reducing wasted labor hours is a smart, ever-evolving means to boost your business performance and achieve your goals faster, without the constant drudgery of systems going out of date. With the priorities laid out above you can save money, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction – all thanks to knowing where to invest your time!
Note that your business might not be able to make huge chances, or even need to structurally shift every process you’ve put in place thus far. Saving time doesn’t mean rethinking your entire organization. It just means using the tools, policies, people and support measures needed to keep you thriving.
