By Sherrill Nixon, Workplace Reporter
October 9 2002

Australian workers waste the equivalent of 90 days a year on unproductive activities, largely because of poor management and a lack of planning or control, a global study has found.

About $120 billion in wages is paid for the three months' worth of time wasted while employees wait for meetings to start, perform tasks already done by someone else, stop work because the computer system has crashed or make personal phone calls and emails.

The seven-nation study found the most efficient workforce was in Germany, where workers spent 63 per cent of their time productively, compared with 60 per cent in Australia.

But only 46 per cent of South Africans' time is spent productively, says the study by Proudfoot Consulting, a global firm belonging to the Britain-based Management Consulting Group.

The average amount of time wasted in the countries surveyed was 92 days a year, out of 225 working days.

Australia was the only country whose productivity level fell in the 2002 survey, dropping one per cent on the previous year.

Proudfoot's Asia Pacific marketing manager, Antonietta Martino, said the optimum productivity level in any organisation was 85 per cent. "So we aren't saying the whole 40 per cent [of unproductive time in Australia] is wasted time ... we are human; we need water, we need food and we go to the bathroom."

"We aren't expected to walk in at 9am and walk out at 5pm and not move."

But she said the difference between the present level of productivity and the optimum 85 per cent was taking a huge toll on Australian corporate profitability.

More than 1300 workers, including 72 in Australia, were observed for a day to calculate productivity levels, with consultants making notes of their activities at 15-minute intervals.

The study also involved interviews with 2700 chief executives in nine countries, including 300 in Australia. The Australian CEOs predicted productivity would increase by 2 per cent in 2002, compared with actual increases of 2.3 per cent in 2001 and 2000.

The top cause of time-wasting in all countries was insufficient planning and control, including problems that were ignored or not anticipated and non-existent procedures, or poor ones, to measure performance.

Australia suffered most from this shortcoming, with 47 per cent - or 42 days - of unproductive time attributed to it. Inadequate management, including lack of people skills, was the second biggest factor.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's workplace policy director, Peter Anderson, said companies had lifted productivity greatly through equipment, design and procedure improvements.

But there was room for improvement in the area of individual productivity.

"This is the area where Australia can do better ... because at the end of the day Australians can't have higher living standards unless we have higher productivity" Mr Anderson said.

But Roger Collins, professor of management at the Australian Graduate School of Management, said performance in some industries could not be measured by whether workers filled every minute with productive activity.

He likened it to an orchestra, saying if it was up to time-and-motion experts "they would say the violin players aren't playing much; let's not pay them".

"If everybody were productive for every hour of the day we would drop dead," Professor Collins said. "For knowledge workers, we aren't paying them to be productive for every minute of the day. We are paying them to come up with the right idea or the right relationship."

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/08/1034061208031.html