As a business owner, I like making improvements. It doesn’t matter whether that comes to gross profit, net profit, hours per day, cars per day and especially employee productivity. 

Many times, owners/managers get so caught up in the day-to-day that we don’t take time to just stop and observe our employees. We’re paying them for their time to work inside our businesses. It’s basically my money = your time. Let’s just do some math here to understand time. 

With 365 days in a year X 24 hours per day, that equals 8,760 hours per year. Otherwise, whether your 10 years old or 90 years old, every human being on the planet has the same amount of time per year. No one gets more and no one gets less. Same goes for our employees, each have 8,760. Now granted, we don’t get all their time, just the time they’re at work. So, do they spend 30%, 35% or even 40% of the 8,760 available hours at work? Let’s put a pencil to it!

40 hours per week X 49 weeks per year (deducted two weeks for vacation and another week for paid holidays) = 1,952 hours at work per year. 1,952 / 8,760 = 22.3%. Wait a minute: you’re telling me the average worker who works 40 hours per week only spends 22.3% of their available time per year at work? Yep! Otherwise, our employees have 77.7% of their time available to themselves. Of course, there is sleeping, getting ready for work, the commute, etc., but it’s still THEIR time, not mine.

If the average employee only spends 22.3% of their time per year at work, this makes productivity paramount! There is a nearly invisible time killer that robs owners/managers of over 1/3 (three hours) on average per day of each employee’s productivity. I am not talking about bathroom breaks, either. This bandit is in the form of interruptions and distractions.

Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has done extensive research on the effects of interruptions/distractions on productivity. Dr. Mark found that the average worker is distracted every 11 minutes and takes over 23 minutes to fully recover from a distraction. For easy figures, let’s say for every $100,000 in payroll that you pay out every year, you’re paying $37,500 in lost productivity due to distractions!

Don’t believe me? HAHA. Let’s use psychologist Yana Weinstein’s simple test and I DARE you to do this test with your employees as a group:

• Find a volunteer. Then with the timer on your phone, have the volunteer count from 1-26. How many seconds did it take? Write down the time.

• Next, do the same with them reciting the alphabet (A,B,C,D, etc.). How many seconds did that take? Write down that time.

• Now, time them switching back and forth between the two activities — in other words, “1-A, 2-B, 3-C” etc. How many seconds did that take? Write down the time.

If there were no cost to task-switching, it should take you exactly double the amount of time to do the switching activity. I suspect you’ll find it takes them much more than double the time. 

So, where are all these distractions coming from? In the world of lean manufacturing, little is written about interruptions/distractions. Why? It’s just a given that if you have systems like standardized work and visual management in place, employees can be much more productive. Take this simple example of a technician interrupting a manager multiple times with “Where’s the next car to work on? Where’s the keys? Where’s the keys to the car in front of it? Where’s the parts? Where’s the work order? Are we fixing the dent in the blend panel?”

Not only do interruptions cost valuable workers time, but they are even much more costly than that. Studies have proven over and over that interruptions double errors. Did you get that? We make twice as many mistakes when we’re interrupted. On top of that, they lead to exhaustion, burnout and ultimately, employee turnover. 

Outside employees interrupting each other, how about cell phones! I still allow cell phones in my shops, and all are used every day with the estimating software. So, I encourage you to get a dry erase board and draw out something like a vertical thermometer. Then graduate it down 100%, 75%, 50%, 25% and 0%. Then show the employees how they spend less than 23% of their time per year at work. Making it visual this way is a real eye-opener for them. They can see that their friends and family have over 77% of their available time per year for texts, phone calls etc. I just told my staff, we’re at work and unless it’s an emergency. Tell your families, “Please leave me alone, I am trying to make us a living here!”