In most all businesses, time is the most precious resource and an employee assistance program (EAP) can be a tremendous asset. If money is lost, that’s bad, but the loss can be made up by increasing revenue or decreasing costs in other areas. But once time is gone, it is gone forever. In other words, managing productivity should be the number one goal of most business owners.
Therefore, reliable and experienced implementation consultants are often a business owner’s best friend. Such professionals can do things like manage workloads and reduce cycle times which significantly affect the daily schedules of your employees. In turn, these items also have a tremendous impact on your bottom line.
What are some reasons you should invest time and money in a productivity survey?
Control Time
The resource scarcity discussed above is flipped in many organizations. Business owners who would never dream of throwing away money sometimes consider their employees’ time to be disposable. Consider that on average, a worker receives over 200 business emails a day and attends over 62 meetings a month. Obviously, these average figures vary significantly according to the organization’s size. But no matter how many workers are in the office, they spend a lot of their time attending meetings and reviewing emails which may or may not contribute to their effectiveness.
In this case, the problem may not be an over-reliance on emails and meetings, but an under-reliance on other forms of communication. A brief face-to-face meeting might be an easier way to get things done than a long email string, and slightly longer meetings with longer agendas and fewer attendees might do just as well as multiple short meetings that involve large numbers of people.
Predict Turnover
Inevitably, people leave a company. Many times, they move on for reasons which are entirely beyond the business owner’s control, so the goal here is not so much to reduce turnover, but to manage it. That’s the best way to minimize disruptions like increased workloads for the employees who remain, which means they spend less time on individual tasks, and the productivity downtime that occurs during employee training and orientation.
Managing turnover has some other benefits as well, such as reducing organizational voids and improving morale. That thought leads us to the third benefit of an efficiency study, which is. . .
Better Attitudes
Most everyone will say that they are happy if the boss asks the question. But if a surveyor asks, and especially if the responses are anonymous, accurate feedback is much more likely. Commonly, surveyors also ask questions like an employee’s willingness to recommend the organization to someone who is looking for a job.
Measuring employee helpfulness is an unexpected corollary. Simply asking such a question motivates employees to assist others with their workloads and have a better attitude about rendering such assistance. Moreover, such an inquiry either confirms or denies management beliefs about the real workhorses in an organization.
The bottom line is that management assessments of employee productivity tend to be either myopic or biased. So, an outside look often changes the way the organization does business, and everyone benefits.
