Top 14 spurious productivity surveys

Last week I wrote about workplace productivity, and claimed barely a week passes without someone somewhere publishing an outlandish, pr-inspired survey supposedly exposing a way in which workers waste time. Eager to maximise my own productivity, and eager to minimise the workplace productivity of timesonline readers, I kept a record of the weirdest ones as I did my research, and am now delighted to present a list of the top 14 most ridiculous productivity surveys, as presented in the press, in reverse order of spuriousness. Somehow “14” seems an apt number for an arena that routinely sees the production of bizarrely precise estimates.

1. Underperforming middle managers are costing the British industry billions of pounds a year in lost productivity, according to management consultants the Hay Group.

2. Meetings with little or no value are costing millions of pounds in lost productivity, according to Bibby Financial Services.

3. British firms fear the Rugby World Cup will cost £461m in lost productivity as staff use corporate systems to keep track of their teams while they should be working according to web content and email security firm Marshal.

4. Workers sleeping-in costs the British economy £619m a year in lost productivity, according to fresh research from hotel chain Travelodge.

5. Computer crashes, fire drills, gossiping and bad timekeeping and pointless meetings and making coffee and other “time wasting” costs British firms up to £6.85bn a year, according to recruitment firm Office Angels.

6. Almost one-third of office staff admit to gambling online during working hours, costing their employers more than £300m a year in lost productivity, according to research published by Morse, the business and technology consultancy.

7. Big Brother is costing British businesses £1.4m a week in lost productivity as employees log on to see the latest antics online, according to software company websense.

8. The four weeks of the 2006 World Cup are set to cost the average UK business £8400 in lost productivity per 100 employees, predicts the web content filtering vendor Marshal.

9. Office politics costs business £7.8bn a year, according to a survey of temporary workers by reed.co.uk.

10. Spam costs American companies more than $70bn a year in lost worker productivity, according to a study released by Nucleus Research.

11. A new white paper from Cornerstone Imaging has concluded that inadequate display monitors are costing businesses thousands of pounds every year in lost productivity.

12. Independent research has found that fragmented communications means that enterprises of 1000 persons could leak nearly $13m a year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses, according to independent research commissioned by Siemens.

13. A typical European employee wastes an average of 67 minutes every day looking for company information – meaning that an organisation with a 1000 staff on £34,000 a year wastes £5.39m a year as staff look for company information to make decisions, according to Information Builders, the leader in business intelligence solutions and integration.

14. Coughing costs the UK economy £875m a year in lost productivity, according to the British Thoracic Society.

Personally, I will only die happy if I see a survey calculating the amount of time workers waste reading surveys on workplace productivity.

Comments

[Matthew]

Good post until the lame joke at the end. You should sum them up - probably comes to more than weekly corporate income.

[Peter]

The company I work at has a "Green" sign telling people that if they shut down their computer every night it will save £50 per year in electricity. But I've calculated that that will cost the firm over £350 per person per year in wasted time (at just 5 minutes per day). False economy.

[Sensible Bloke]

Peter: are you being serious? It takes 5 minutes to turn off your computer? 3 clicks does it for most people. And yes, £50 per person IS worth having - maybe you should pay the company electricity bill. Trust me, it will give you a new perspective!

[Sathnam]

Yet another example: apparently "the UK loses £8.1bn each year through lost productivity due to people... skipping breakfast." The company behind this spurious survey: ‘food services provider’ BaxterStorey

[Cheryl's Office]

I recently set up a new office. I am amazed how much more productive the staff has become. I decided to purchase new office furniture including new desks, conference tables, and files. With the modular configuration I purchased I can reconfigure the office every few months. This periodic change seems to help improve the office productivity and creativity.

[Paul Danon]

What's spurious or weird about much of this? Meetings devour hours of people's time and produce very little. Lost information (and looking for it) is very wasteful. Gossip, absenteeism and leisure-use of the internet are also drains on productivity. I think the headline is misleading.