THE DIRTY SECRET...:

Productivity's Four Sworn Enemies: The biggest time-wasters in the workplace have nothing to do with online shopping (Rick Wartzman, 12/02/11, Business Week)

[Peter] Drucker, I suspect, would have found all the focus on these Cyber Monday shenanigans a bit silly. Rather, the real cause for concern among managers should be those time-wasters that dog their enterprises every day of the week, all year long.

In The Effective Executive, his 1967 classic, Drucker identified four specific areas in which time loss "results from poor management and deficient organization." One of these is overstaffing.

"My first-grade arithmetic primer asked: 'If it takes two ditch-diggers two days to dig a ditch, how long would it take four ditch-diggers?'" Drucker wrote. "In first grade, the correct answer is, of course, 'one day.' In the kind of work, however, with which executives are concerned, the right answer is probably 'four days' if not 'forever.'"

A telltale sign of overstaffing: If the manager of a team spends more than about a tenth of his or her time "on feuds and frictions, on jurisdictional disputes and questions of cooperation, and so on," Drucker said, "then the work force is almost certainly too large." When that happens, he added, "people get into each other's way," as there is insufficient room "to move without colliding with one another."

What's more, Drucker asserted in a later essay titled "How to Guarantee Non-performance," "overstaffing always focuses energies on the inside, on 'administration' rather than 'results,' on the machinery rather than its purpose. ... It immobilizes behind a façade of furious busyness."

...is that businesses actually lose no productivity when those employees shop at work.  They weren't doing anything productive to begin with.

Posted by oj at December 3, 2011 7:55 AM
Tweet   

Follow @brothersjudd