Importance of “time as capital” highlighted in survey

A recent study has highlighted how many hours are lost by business executives sitting in unproductive meetings and responding to emails.

The Bain & Company and VoloMetrix study examined the time budgets of 17 large corporations and found executives today on average receive 30,000 pieces of external communications per year. This is up from around 1,000 in the 1970s. The study suggests that, at the current rate, executives will spend more than one fifth of their week managing emails in just a few years.

As a result of this wasted time, companies are not tracking and monitoring employee work habits and this is leading to productivity levels in some businesses waning.

At the moment, 15 per cent of an organisation's time is spent in and preparing meetings. This has gradually increased since 2008 and in one example, a company meeting consumed 7,000 hours per year. Calculate the company-wide work put into the meeting and this number ballooned to 300,000.

Leader of Bain's Organisation Practice in the Americas Michael Mankins said business executives need to be more engaged with employees and take time to check their individual workloads.

"Most time management advice focuses on individual actions – be choosy with meetings, rein in your email box.  But this advice sometimes goes against your company's culture: Ignore emails and meeting invitations and you risk alienating your colleagues – or your boss," he said.

Mr Mankins explained some companies are creating cultures where "time is treated as a scarce resource and invested as prudently as capital".

Time management is key for businesses to be aware of as it can easily get out of hand and by then it could be too late. One solution to this issue is for enterprises to invest in HRMS software which can help executives define and track employee goals and create development plans so everyone is working on the same page.