“The average UK working week is approximately 40 hours per week, with an average working day being 8 hours, 5 days a week. With modern working patterns, flexible hours & irregular contracts now the norm, this can vary widely, but for the purposes of this article, we shall take the 40 hour week as a standard.
Although the traditional days of 9-5 are well & truly a thing of the past, there are still routines & hours in every business & for each employee there is a maximum timeframe where they can be productive.
Taking our 40 hour week as a model & basing the time available for productivity at 7-7.5 hours per day (legal requirement for lunchbreak to be given, usually ½ hour to 1 hour) how can an employer be certain that their employees are being 100% productive in their actual working time?
Many businesses have Time & Motion studies already in place based on the time it should take an employee to complete a certain task. However, if an employer starts to notice that productivity is not where it should be & tasks are falling behind; it might be time to complete a Time Study to seek out the areas of non-productivity & where time is being lost.
Being non-productive does not mean not working. What it does mean is times when an employee employed to undertake a certain task is off task or engaged in other activities other than the one they are employed to undertake. Non productive time can be activities such as off task administration, time caught up on telephones, logistics issues, toilet breaks (legally allowed, but sometimes excessive) problem solving when parts or suppliers have let a business down, etc.
An example of this is in the business I run with my partner Daniel Morris. We run a business servicing & repairing motorcycles. Daniel is the Technician & I am the back-office support.
We work on average 9 hours a day, often 6 days a week. When motorcycles overrun due to unexpected issues having arisen during the repair & or supply chain issues hold us up; we can work 10 hours & sometimes 7 days a week.
However, recently we have been taking a more in depth look at the turnover of the business offset against the actual income we are able to take. With Daniel being the only technician & the only person in our business able to repair motorcycles, he should be productive – working on motorcycles – at least 8 hours a day, with me picking up the lion share of the running of the business around him.
However, there are some things I cannot undertake & this is where Daniel’s productivity becomes hampered. When parts need ordering, customers need to speak directly to him for technical insights, searching for wiring diagrams, technical insights, contacting specific suppliers, etc; this is when Daniel is non-productive.
Although to some, all of these tasks are part of running your own business, it is important to understand when you are a small business how many hours per week you are able to actually sell & how the system can be improved to allow more hours to be sold to make the business more efficient & more productive.
As a couple we have undertaken time studies before to nail down where the non-productive hours were going. One of the biggest areas where time was being absorbed away from the physical time available to repair motorcycles was in Daniel having to stop what he was doing to speak with people on the telephone.
Having identified the amount of time lost to this, not just in the conversations but also the back & forth from the workshop & re-engaging time with the repair he was undertaking; we decided that Daniel would not speak with customers at the time they called, but that a message would be taken & in an allocated space at the end of a working day, he would then call them back.
This simple act suddenly released Daniel to be able to remain engaged entirely in his work, allowed him to remain engaged & focused on the task at hand & removed the back & forth time drain on his productivity. Daniel still has to make time for technical searches & parts ordering as he is the expert & it is an area I cannot support in.
We are currently undertaking another time study just to see where any other gaps may be appearing & how we can continue to address productive & non-productive time in our business.
Simply using an Excel spreadsheet, we are timing every activity Daniel undertakes to the minute over the next two weeks, with a view to reviewing the data at the end of the process to evaluate where we can be more productive in the time available to us.
In my business model there are only two of us & we are a small independent. However, it should not matter if there are 2 people or thousands, being able to account for the productive & non-productive time in any business scenario is part of any companies’ road to success.
One business tool which could help in an office-based environment is Toggl. Toggl is brilliant if used correctly, as it can act as a real time timer for activities & once used for a week or two, it can show which activities & tasks have taken place & the timeframes/percentages of each.
Gaining an insight into any businesses use of time & how productivity can be directly linked to efficiency should be part of any businesses toolkit when striving for success”.
Written by Katy-Jane Mason for & on behalf of Virtually Smart Ltd.
