You probably spend a huge part of your time at work reading and answering e-mails. However, do you have any idea of how many working hours you lose? According to a research published in the Harvard Business Review, led by AffinityLive with 500 professionals, time management in companies is disastrous: each respondent caused a loss of about $ 50,000 a year in revenue by not dealing with the pile of mails from clients, specially.
Although more than half of employees work with timesheets in order to charge customers fairly, almost 40% of them reported never having noted how long they spend answering emails. Only a third of respondents said “always” or “often”. Taking into account the size of the professional services sector, the survey estimates that the US economy is losing absurd 50 million hours of productivity, which means $ 7.4 billion a day. This is because, if the hours spent with e-mails were credited in timesheets, the amount charged to customers would be much higher.
Your everyday problem
According to Geoff McQueen, CEO of AffinityLive, after talking with CEOs of other companies in the professional services industry, “their problems were the same. They would be working harder and longer and wouldn’t know whether or not it had been financially worthwhile until a couple of weeks after the end of the month. If the projects were big winners or major disasters, don’t know, everything in the middle was muddy.” McQueen estimated that people often deal with dozens of emails a day, taking 20-30 seconds on each one, and about five minutes to write longer answers. The fact is that it is almost impossible to have a time management noting every time you check your e-mails, especially because you probably access your inbox a few times throughout the day.
Why people stop to fill their timesheets
The result is that many people end up spending Friday afternoons trying to remember what they did over the week, to fill their timesheets. The data collected by AffinityLive proved what you might expect: who fills the spreadsheet once a day said to have more time management and accuracy in their record-keeping than those who wait all week to note – or rather guess – tasks and time spent. After all, would be a solution being more rigid? According to DeVoe, a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management of Rotman School of Management, being too attuned to how employees are spending their time can be psychologically problematic. “Experiments conducted by me show that when we record our time too often, we become more impatient, stressed and, even worse, stingy with our free time.”
The tragedy has solution
Technology can help, DeVoe says, precisely because it can measure the employee’s activities accurately and discreetly, without many of the psychological pitfalls. The teacher gives his verdict: companies should “consider the monetary value when making decisions about the way the team spends their time, but never keep reminding them repeatedly how much their time costs.” With Runrun.it, project management software, your team does not have to fill out timesheets. Just click play to work and pause when needed. Naturally. The software times everything and still esteem when each task will be delivered. Less stress and anxiety for employees and more accurately to the manager with reports that measure time and costs that projects and clients demand. Try it for free: http://runrun.it
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