As a survey of 2,000 companies reveals workers spend almost 1/3 of their times performing tasks that add little or no value, is it time to look at how much of your business’ workload is pointless?
Many years ago, I worked in an office with its own payroll department that had no authority to do anything. Extend your hours? We’ll have to refer it to head office. Challenge your overtime hours calculation? That’ll be head office too. Thinking about maternity leave? Think about it with head office. And yet, if you ever seized the initiative and called head office, you can guess what the response would be: speak to your local payroll team first.
You might think that the explosion in IT has rendered such pointlessness obsolete, but WebExpenses latest report is setting the record straight.
The study of 2,000 office workers found that almost 1/3 of employee time is spent effectively wasting it. The study found that “the average employee spends 142 minutes a day on admin, manual paperwork, and ‘pointless’ meetings.”
Promoting pointlessness
What’s to blame for this lack of productivity? According to the report, 50% of workers feel they duplicate work because of a lack of coordination between systems and departments. 44% blame the tech – with outdated technology accounting for 26 minutes’ worth of unproductive time every day. And ‘pointless’ processes such as expenses claims devour another 24 minutes every day.
Filling out the rest of the time are completing paperwork, attending pointless meetings and holding time-consuming conversations.
According the report, all this pointlessness isn’t just costing businesses time and money; it’s having a wearing effect on employees too.
Payroll processing problems
Of all the frustrating, pointless processes a business can have, it’s our experience that legacy payroll systems are often responsible for many of them – and these are often compounded by aging IT.
You know there are better ways of doing it. Everyone knows there are better ways of doing it. But unpicking it all – and getting to grips with a new IT system – feels far more demanding than simply putting up with what you have, quirks, foibles and all.
Yet as the report demonstrates, those quirks could well be costing time, money and staff satisfaction.
Outsourcing payroll
Outsource your payroll and your staff don’t have to learn a new software system inside out – they just send the monthly data to us and we do the rest, from processing and reconciling to arranging payment. In fact, you should be able to free up most of the time they currently spend grinding away at your aging payroll and IT processes.
From speed and efficiency to error reduction and freeing resource, you’re likely to find that removing one source of pointlessness from your staff’s lives can actually save you money.
Take another look at your payroll processes. If too many of them are pointless, talk to us about outsourcing them. Talk to us.