4 Challenges Idle Time Brings For Business Productivity And Tips To Solve Them

You may have experienced some of these situations during your work – waiting for a team member to submit a report so you can submit yours or sitting at your desk waiting for clients always late to the meeting. If you can relate to any of these situations, then you’re familiar with “idle time.”

In a nutshell, it refers to those times when employees are paid although they are not being productive. It could occur due to unforeseen or unavoidable constraints, like waiting on other team members or slow periods at work.

Nevertheless, idle time becomes a challenge when it’s unchecked or uncontrolled by management.

It’s also commonly used to refer to when physical assets, e.g., machinery and equipment, are in good condition but aren’t being utilized. Whatever the case, it is unproductive time, which means the company is losing time and money that could have been put to better use.

1. Wasting time

For one thing, it’s a waste of the most precious resource available to us – time. It is irreplaceable and can’t be bargained for or renegotiated once spent. However, wasting time at work is a practice that can gradually creep up on even the best of us.

Continuous idle time eventually has far-reaching effects on the staff and the enterprise as a whole.

Facts and stats about idle time in the workplace are staggering. For example, a survey published by Zippia estimates that during the typical 8-hour workday, employees only spend 4 hours and 12 minutes actively working.

Another often overlooked issue that increases idle time is little distractions at work – long meetings, frequent emails, and chatty colleagues, to mention a few. These distractions often go unnoticed but have a lasting effect on productivity.

Even small disruptions can significantly impact productivity. Once distracted, it’s difficult for workers to pick up exactly where they stopped.

Thus, the average person takes at least 4 minutes to fully refocus and get back on task after a distraction, according to Marsha Egan, who is a certified workplace productivity coach. As a result, the more distractions a person encounters, the lower their overall productivity.

Possible solution:

Parkinson’s Law postulates that work expands to fill the time allocated – assigning a definite time for tasks helps workers to accomplish them on time and to manage their workload most effectively.

When people have time-boxed tasks, it can motivate them to follow the structure and accomplish those activities within the desired time frame.

Several modern task management solutions exist to help businesses address the issue of idle time quickly.

Be careful, though. In the process of tracking and minimizing idle time, don’t fall into the trap of micromanaging your employers. They’ll resent it and resent you as well, leading to other problems that will further reduce productivity, like stifled innovation.

Instead, demonstrate that you trust them to do the right thing. Help your employees monitor their time by providing them with a user-friendly time tracking software to track how they spend their workday.

Another idea that works is to plan and prioritize tasks at least one day in advance. This is a great way to ensure your workforce is not wasting time.

Possibly the most practical solution is using an automated time tracker like Paymo Track. Start the tracker, leave it running in the background, and at the end of the work day just link timestamps to task entries:

Download Paymo Track for free.

2. Breeding a culture of inefficiency

The ancient philosopher Aristotle famously said about human nature, “we are what we repeatedly do.” When your staff notices that they can continuously get away with not finishing their allocated tasks efficiently, they will gradually get accustomed to putting in less effort to finish work promptly and begin to deliver the barest minimum.

Although you don’t need to run your organization round the clock on a tight schedule like a military establishment, you simply can’t afford to let idle time linger.

Another danger with this kind of lax work environment is the potential ripple effect on other staff and newly recruited employees. Some of these effects are: other employees may be compelled to overcompensate by doing more or over-delivering to pick up the slack, and your newly recruited staff might adopt the generally laid-back attitude of your current workers.

This leads to a vicious circle of resentment, exhaustion, and disengagement.

Possible solutions:

An often overlooked contributor to idle time is the work culture your staff gets accustomed to from day one. What are your onboarding processes like? Poorly planned onboarding processes can lead to inefficiencies that leave loopholes for idle time because the new staff just don’t know what to do next.

For example, disorganized onboarding processes can leave new hires with unallocated hours for days at a time without clarification on their next steps.

However, when your onboarding processes run optimally and efficiently, it conveys a first impression that your organization runs a well-managed workflow that values and prioritizes time management.

Another way to limit idle time is to encourage your workforce to focus on improving and finishing critical tasks one at a time—starting with the highest-impact task. This way, you can empower them to avoid little chunks of idle time and maximize their efficiency instead.

For example, it’s vital that daily workflow is well-planned, clarified, and communicated to all parties concerned. When everyone resumes work and has the details of what to do, how to do it, and when to do what, the chances are high that the rest of the day will go smoothly.

Furthermore, examine your workflow and processes to detect inefficiencies across different departments. It’s also advisable that major activities are marked as time-sensitive.

In this type of work environment, every team member will have to pull their own weight since it will be readily evident where (or from whom) the delays are coming from.

3. Losing revenue

Whoever said “Time is money” knew what they were talking about—project profitability is your primary business goal. Productivity is a major driver of business profits and revenue, but unchecked idle time can undermine that productivity and cause crippling financial losses that will frustrate any kind of project.

A culture of unchecked idle time will inevitably lead to budget overruns, possible penalties, loss of revenue, and loss of business from both present and future clients. If your organization repeatedly misses milestones and deadlines, it’s unacceptable to clients.

Possible solutions:

Start by taking a step back. Before you sign the dotted lines on a new project, contract, or mission-critical task, double-check that the timelines allocated for major deliverables are realistic.

This is especially important for milestones that carry monetary penalties for non-performance. This way, you’re not setting yourself and your team members up for failure from day one.

Also, consider adopting tried-and-trusted project management methodologies like agile. It provides a structure to help you break work down into smaller time-focused portions or sprints combined with regular feedback sessions.

Done this way, major project milestones are easier to manage, track, and finish. Any potential deviations will be quickly noticed and corrected.

Additionally, you can incorporate quality control tools like the Pareto principle in your workflow. Also known as the 80/20 rule, this principle recommends that 20% of your time should ideally produce 80% of your results.

Regularly identify, highlight, and track the 20% of tasks that can provide the most monetary value for your business. The objective here is to ensure that these tasks are delivered optimally and on time.

Also, when handling particularly time-sensitive projects, weigh the possibility of giving your team an early completion bonus or incentive.

Another solution is time reporting.

If you’ve been tracking your time and have a lot of data to crunch, generate time reports.

Good time tracking software will use all that data to give you a detailed look at how your team’s time was spent.

Reviewing time spent on certain tasks in the past will give you reliable estimates for upcoming, similar tasks. This way, you’ll be able to make better business decisions – but how? After reviewing monthly reports, one actionable step is to make adjustments to stay on budget.

When is a good time to review time reports? Review them as a team leader or project manager at the end of the week or month. Bonus: review them every quarter if time tracking is a metric of your OKRs. What’s at stake?

For any project manager, time reports are helpful for (team) performance reviews, course corrections, and salary raises. What’s more, they can plan and distribute tasks to avoid overbooking or underbooking and make changes to employees’ workflows. In section 6, we’ll touch on the use—and usefulness!—of time reporting as a desirable feature/module and how that works in project management software. (Also, dive deeper into the benefits of time reporting for project management.)

4. Creating a demotivated workforce

Studies indicate that too much idle time can wreak havoc on our mental health. According to Dr. Sandeep Govil, a psychiatrist at Saroj Super Speciality Hospital, remaining idle for long durations can lead to issues like anxiety, depression, poor thinking capacity, loss of concentration, and even a decline in memory.

Workers in this state are demotivated; they have lost their inspiration or will to take action. This lack of interest and enthusiasm for work typically has far-reaching consequences for any organization.

Luckily, once the signs of mental health challenges start appearing in the workplace, there’s a lot that employers can do to turn around the situation regardless of what the underlying causes might be.

For instance, here’s a look at what some companies are doing to support their workforce’s mental state. An example is Akamai Technologies and its commitment to the mental health of its employees. The group hired a corporate wellness program manager responsible for developing, implementing, and maintaining resources that empower employees to thrive at all times.

Some program activities they’ve used in the past included sleep improvement workshops, pet therapy, and outdoor scavenger hunts.

Possible solution:

In addition to the time management solutions mentioned in earlier sections, affected organizations can try to get staff out of a mental slump and fired up again by creating some healthy competition in the company.

Amongst other things, healthy workplace competition can help to refocus staff and gradually pull them out of an unhealthy preoccupation with the mental issues that they might be facing.

One way to motivate staff is by offering incentives to a few high-performing staff that consistently meet their deadlines and demonstrate commitment to company goals and objectives.

Here are a few tips that have worked for some companies: one example is Unilever’s digital reward system, uFlexReward Program. Instead of offering employees generic and standardized rewards, this program demonstrates thoughtfulness – they analyze individual preferences to offer personalized benefits tailored to their unique needs.

In addition, Unilever organizes an annual “Unilever Heroes Awards” to celebrate and recognize employees who make a difference, show excellence, then display initiative and commitment to the firm’s goals and objectives.

If your business chooses to apply this option, the general idea is that the incentives offered don’t necessarily need to be monetary; they can be of a more creative kind.

In conclusion

It’s safe to say that after investing years, money, and time into a business, owners strongly desire to succeed. The fact is, no matter how much your investment is, and regardless of all the infrastructure and bells and whistles provided in a business, the workforce remains the number one asset of any company.

Neglecting your workers or paying little attention to what they do with their time while they’re on your payroll can eventually sink your enterprise.

The tips outlined in this article will go a long way in averting that kind of situation.

First published on July 21, 2022.