How much time does your organisation waste?
How much time does your organisation waste?
In my two previous blogs (find the first one Here and the second one Here) I mentioned time.
Here at The IT Training Surgery we are all about time. Time saved rather than time wasted.
So here’s the question I posed in the title, how much time does your organisation waste?
Remember Jill from the other blogs? Well let’s assume that Jill needs to summarise a long list of entries in Excel. You know the kind of thing – here is an example:
A long list of sales data about the sales of Coffee Island.
Now Jill needs to summarise the sales of Coffee according to the type of coffee sold. This could take her some time. She would need to perform the following steps:
- Sort the data by Item (type of coffee)
- Then count down the rows that all have the same type of drink in them and add a new row at the bottom
- Then add the word Total to the first column
- Do a sum in the Sales Column to show the total sales for that item.
Repeat for as many items as are in the list! Quite time consuming and frustrating too.
It could take her anything between 5 and 10 minutes each time she has to analyse this type of data.
Training Jill will save her time
Now what if I told you that there are at least three ways to do the same kind of analysis and each of those will take around two minutes!
Without training Jill will continue to spend ten minutes analysing this data each time. Now let’s ramp it up and imagine that Jill needs to do this several times a day. Effectively spending thirty to forty minutes analysing data that with training would take at most 10 minutes all together.
I have focussed on just one Excel issue that is wasting time in Jill’s organisation. There are many more.
Average Salary and amount wasted
If Jill is on an average salary of £26,500 (see this article) and she wastes half an hour per day, that is 2.5 hours per week and 120 hours in a 48 week year. This equates to 17 days work! That is almost a month’s salary.
Jill is not the only employee in her organisation so just multiply her time wasted by the number of employees and the numbers are staggering.
In Jill’s organisation they are wasting approximately 120 hours or 17 days per person because without training staff will not be performing at their best.
How much time does your organisation waste? Is it like the one Jill works for?
Have you ever considered what the lack of training costs your organisation? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think.
To help your staff learn ways to save time rather than waste time, give us a call on 020 8203 1774 or email us enquiries@theittrainingsurgery.com
I’d write a macro and it would only take a few seconds to do this calculation. While I was at it, I’d make some graphs to go along with it.
Hi Gershon, Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree – however the majority of people who I come across when training Excel have no idea of how to sort effectively, use Subtotals or Tables, let alone record a Macro – if they knew what it was!
My point is that without providing training on these simple tools, so much time is wasted. Of course once you have more advanced skills you can save even more time with Macros to automate a process.
Thanks again
Shelley
A simple example and great business case. How can any buiness owner or manager ignore?
Thanks for taking the time to comment Judy.
This is so obvious and yet we sometimes forget that we can make things better by investing time creating something that will save lots of time in the future! Thanks for the tip!
Hi Morena
As a business financial manager, are there any other tips you could add?
Spending time and money in training definitely makes financial sense 🙂
The other thing that I also suggest, in terms of investing your time now to save it in the future, is systematising the tasks that are required quite often, the advantages are that you do things consistently well, you don’t forget anything and should the person responsible for that task ever leaves, the ‘knowledge’ remains in the business…
And creating a system is as simple as registering the steps by step of how better to do that task plus a checklist… and voilá