Managers and employees are wasting HUGE amounts of their paid time.

As you and your business or organization turn your calendars from December 2008 to January 2009...you might want to pause...and consider the amount of "work" hours in 2009 that will be wasted. Unproductive. Money down the drain.

What Others Say About Waste at Work

"I can go in and save 30 percent in almost any company because there is so much waste and mismanagement." – Carl Icahn, billionaire financier and activist investor, quoted in The Wall Street Journal. "If you examine any work environment, you'll find many people who are wasting their energy on unproductive behaviors and feelings. Ironically, they're often the busiest people in their organizations." – Morris R. Shechtman in Fifth Wave Leadership. "Most managers get up and do what they want to do, not what needs to be done." – Steven S. Little, in The Milkshake Moment. "Anything that doesn't add value is waste. Good business managers have an obligation to constantly eliminate it... There's nothing that can't be made more productive within a week." Pat Lancaster, founder, chairman of Lantech. Quoted in Less Is More.

Consider, also, that wasting time begins with the leaders – the managers, supervisors, and team leaders.

Heike Bruch, co-author with Sumantra Ghoshal, of the book A Bias for Action, affirms the key theme of their studies: nine of 10 managers are wasting their time. Bruch includes supervisors and team leaders when referring to managers.

Bruch states that "ninety percent of managers lack either energy, or focus, or both." She adds, "They are unable to drive their most important tasks and goals." Bruch is professor and director at the Institute for Leadership and Human Resources Management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Here's how Bruch and Ghoshal explained their conclusion that 90 percent of managers "are unable to accomplish important tasks and goals."

• 4 of 10 managers are frenzied. They are "distracted by the myriad tasks that they juggle each day. They are highly energetic but are very unfocused and appear to others as frenzied, desperate, and hasty."
• 3 of 10 managers are procrastinators. They "procrastinate on doing the work that really matters to the organization because they lack both energy and focus."
• 2 of 10 managers are detached. They are "disengaged or detached from work altogether."
• Only 1 of 10 managers is purposeful. They "get the job done. They are highly focused and energetic."

 Asked if these findings that apply to managers, supervisors and team leaders also apply to employees, Bruch replied: "Yes, our findings also apply to employees. However, they are more critical to managers." The findings reported in A Bias for Action were based on a 10-year study.

In an article in the Ivey Business Journal, based on their book, Bruch and Ghoshal stated, "Fully ninety percent [of managers] squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities; they fritter away their time and energy in mindless 'busyness.'" They further wrote, "Most managers rush from meeting to meeting, check their e-mail constantly, put out fire after fire, and make countless phone calls. In short, they engage in an astonishing amount of fast-moving activity that allows almost no time for reflection or actual leadership."

Other studies also report wasted time at work.

Surveys and studies over the last few years consistently show that the typical executive, manager and employee wastes multiple hours of paid time weekly. Here are some examples of findings:

• Gallup's late 2007 "Work and Education" poll of U.S. employees turned up these employee-reported results: Employees said their coworkers wasted an average of 1.44 hours a day. "Wasted time" was defined in the poll as "really does not do anything productive." Next, the employees estimated their own wasted time, reporting they averaged one hour of wasted time daily.
• A 2007 survey by America Online and Salary.com found that employees getting paid for average workdays of 8.5 hours were wasting an average of 1.7 hours a day at work. (This result was an improvement over 2005, when a similar survey reported an average of 2.09 hours wasted daily.)
• A study in 2005 by Microsoft found that Americans put in an average of 45 hours a week at work, but 16 of those paid hours were unproductive. That's 1 out of 2.8 hours...unproductive. That's almost 36 percent of paid time...unproductive.

Examples of time-wasting at work: Following are a few of the numerous ways executives, managers and employees put in non-productive time during paid work hours.

• Meetings. The Microsoft survey found that employees in the U.S. reported spending 5.5 hours a week in meetings, and 71 percent of the employees felt the meetings weren't productive. NFI Research reported a survey of business executives in 2007 with these findings: 57 percent of the executives reported spending 21 percent to 60 percent of their time in internal meetings...and 56 percent of the executives declared that half of their meetings were unproductive.
• Unclear priorities. Thirty-one percent of U.S. employees in the Microsoft survey said unclear priorities caused them to waste time. In addition, 42 percent put the blame on procrastination, and 39 percent put the blame on lack of team communication.
• Gaming. A 2007 survey by video game provider PopCap Games found that nearly 25 percent of white-collar employees were playing video games at work. Some play during business meetings and conference calls. More than 33 percent of executives reported playing video games at work. Participating in the online survey were professional, clerical, middle management, technical and senior management personnel.
• Computer putzing and computer slacking. It's not uncommon for employees with access to computers to spend from one to three hours a day during work time engaged in personal computer-related and Internet-related activity. The America Online and Salary.com survey found 44.7 percent of responding employees saying they engage in non-work related Internet usage.
• Multitasking. Trying to focus on and do more than one task at a time. Example: Talking on the phone while engaged in a work task. In an article on multitasking, appearing in the Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger wrote: "A growing body of scientific research shows one of jugglers' favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you less efficient and, well, stupider. Trying to do two or three things at once or in quick succession can take longer overall than doing them one at a time, and may leave you with reduced brainpower to perform each task."
• PowerPointing. Think of this as combining computer putzing and wasted meeting time. Dave Paradi, co-author of Guide to PowerPoint, in his Website column cites a Microsoft estimate that there are more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day. Then Paradi continues: "If we assume some relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per day."
• Personal tasks. Employees in an OfficeTeam survey in 2007 reported they spent an average of 36 minutes a day doing personal tasks on paid time.

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