Want to increase productivity? Cut employee hours

When an employee is salaried, managers don’t care about their time. They think it is elastic. This is why intranets perform so poorly.

It was a hot summer evening in Houston. I was walking to the car park with John, a member of an intranet team for a large organization. “Management doesn’t care how long it takes us to book a meeting room,” he said resignedly. “They just think we can work longer, later.”

I was sitting in the office of the head of IT for another large organization. “If you tell me that you can save me a man year,” he said with a smile on his face, “I want to know which man I can fire.”

Another senior manager scoffed at the idea of saving five minutes every time a staff member wanted to find a location. “They could be out smoking a cigarette during that five minutes,” he said.

Time is the essence of the world we live in. It is the scarcest resource. Those who manage time well will triumph. This is nothing new. The original management concepts by Frederick Taylor and others were focused on the management of the time of factory workers.