The Hidden Cost Of Inefficiency

I sat on a full plane today. We had a 5 minute delay. Not much time you may think.

People often reflect on how it is impossible to buy time and so it is important to enjoy the time you have and make the most of it. This is great advice. Do you make the most of your time? More importantly have you considered where your time is lost every day for yourself and your team?

Those 5 minutes multiplied by all the people on the plane equates to about 340 minutes - that is over 5 hours! How many hours leak out of your business in 2-5 minute segments?

It reminded me of one of my favourite Steve Jobs legacy stories. Jobs challenged the Macintosh operating system engineer, Larry Kenyon, about the boot up time being too long. He countered the objections he received about it being impossible to make it quicker, asking, “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” Kenyon conceded he probably could. Jobs did a calculation and showed him that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year—the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year! This insight inspired Kenyon to have the Mac booting up 28 seconds faster!

Inefficiency bleeds time out of your organisation. Time is money. It is worth stopping to attend to for this alone. But wait there’s more…!

One of the biggest costs of inefficiency in any organisations is the toll it takes on team morale, motivation and engagement. When people feel frustrated and feel like they are wasting their time and that there are better ways to do things, you run the risk of them leaving (and your best people are usually the first to go) and/or staying and wallowing in a state of apathy. The inefficiency of systems then become amplified exponentially by the ‘inefficiency’ of your people.

Is your workplace a breeding ground for discontent and apathy? The seeds of discontent grow into the choking vines of resentment. Do you need to do some weeding? Root out all waste and make systems as simple as possible (& no simpler according to Einstein!) When every human touch adds values and every process and system is necessary then you know you have a bountiful environment for success to flourish!