Punctuality and Productivity

Corporate America suffers millions of dollars in losses each year because of employees spending the first 10 to 15 minutes of their workday conducting non-business rituals, such as getting coffee, eating breakfast, and chatting with co-workers about their evening or weekend.

Punctuality

There are a great deal of young people who are new to the workforce and may not know that it is inappropriate to do this; however, seasoned workers should know better and should mentor those who do not. It is recommended that employees arrive to work approximately 15 minutes early in order to get settled in so that they will be ready to work at their scheduled start time.

Monetary Losses

The figures given in the following example are a conservative estimate. It must be acknowledged that not all employees would make the same hourly wage; and, not all employees waste company time. Of course, there is also the fact that some employees waste more than others do during a work day.

Say an employee is paid $20 per hour. During a 5-day work week a company would pay $25 just for that employee to get their morning coffee. That is $1,250.00 per year (this estimate deducts two weeks from the year for illness, vacation time, and holidays).

Next, imagine that every employee in a company of 5,000 wastes 15 minutes every day. That is an incredible $6,250,000.00 that the company would lose each and every year because its employees utilize company time to conduct personal errands each morning.

Decreased Productivity

The same example could be applied to determine the total amount of productivity time that the company loses as a whole.

If every employee in a company of 5,000 wasted 15 minutes of company time every day, the company would lose an estimated total of 312,500 hours each year (that is about 62.50 hours per employee per year). It would take roughly 150 full-time employees to work that amount of time in one year. Just think of all of the projects that could have been completed in that amount of time!

Now that you have a better perspective of wasting company time, would you want to run a business knowing that you were paying your employees millions of dollars each year for filling their coffee cups in the morning? It would cost less money to provide each and every employee with a coffee shop beverage every morning for the whole year.

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