Overview
If you’ve ever had a leaky faucet, toilet, appliance, or pipe, you know what a pain it can be. It usually starts small (and often unnoticed), but usually gets worse over time. You might ignore it for a while until it turns into a bigger problem. We’ve had countless small leaks (sprinklers are great, aren’t they?) and two major ones: a slab leak that resulted in a full master bathroom remodel, and a washing machine that malfunctioned and flooded most of the house…when we weren’t home.
As bad as water leaks are, there are much costlier leaks: the ones that leak time. And if you’re like most businesses, there are plenty of leaks out there, whether you know about them or not. If you ignore them, two key things happen. First, they get worse, because they tend to have a ripple effect, and not addressing them signals that it’s not important to prevent them. Second, time means money, and inflation means the cost of leaks is continually rising. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can address the leaks in three key steps: identify them, prioritize them, and fix them.
Identify the leaks
Start by eliminating the denial – every business has time leaks to some extent. It’s a natural part of the evolution and growth of a business. The bigger your business, the higher your employee count, the more leaks you probably have. Realize that it’s often hundreds or thousands of hours of time.
Here are key areas to look for leaks:
- Irrelevant work – unnecessary work that doesn’t need to be done
- Disengaged work – work people don’t like or understand – leading to distraction, delays, errors, and rework
- Manual work – work that is performed manually but could easily be automated
- Inefficient work – work that could be easily be streamlined by combining steps or reorganizing steps
- Idle work – time where no work is getting done due to bottlenecks or waiting
When water leaks get worse, they waste water and can ruin materials. When time leaks get worse, they waste the money of that time, but they also negatively impact culture. No one wants to see waste happening – at the end of the day, we all suffer from it and eat the cost. It’s even worse when it continues unaddressed – it spreads, because it’s demotivating. Good news – the opposite is true too. When you continuously address leaks, it signals that continuous improvement, stewardship, and accountability are important. It especially helps when you reward them!
Prioritize the leaks
Track the time that is spent on as many tasks as possible, and set realistic benchmarks. Continuously compare the time spent against the benchmarks (and the benchmarks themselves!) to identify the opportunities for improvement. It may seem like overkill for everyone to track their time, but there’s simply no better way to measure for success. It also really helps with planning and resourcing. The phrase “measure what you treasure” sums this up perfectly.
Make a list of the tasks and processes that are not meeting expectations. Identify the effort and resources (time, people, money) to improve them. Improvements could consist of process reengineering, automation, training, or some combination of them.
Then prioritize the improvements. This is often the toughest step and where unnecessary politics stifle progress. This separate article discusses best practices for prioritizing. At a minimum, consider these three criteria when prioritizing:
- How much time is leaking – the more time that’s leaking, the higher it should be prioritized
- How many people the leak affects – the more people affected, the higher it should be prioritized
- How much effort it takes to fix the leak – the lower the effort, the higher it should be prioritized
Fix the leaks
Once you’ve identified and prioritized the leaks, make a commitment to fix them. You don’t need a perfect plan – just get started. Make it an iterative process. You’ll be able to reinvest the time savings for further improvements! Get everyone involved, and motivate them with rewards – monetary, time off, and a team party are great ideas. From the financial perspective, zero-base budgeting can be helpful for fixing spend leaks. Rather than accepting last year’s budget/results and tweaking, you build the budget up from scratch and justify all items. A similar approach can be taken with how employees spend their time.
The easiest place to start is with irrelevant work. If it’s not crucial, don’t do it. If it doesn’t align to your mission, core values, or compliance requirements, chances are it isn’t necessary. Minimize the idle where people just aren’t doing anything. A great approach is to replace it with training time. Training is one of those things you almost can’t do enough of and though there are often funds available for it, rarely is there time budgeted for it. However, history says that the payback is absolutely worth it.
When fixing leaks, aim for long-term quality, not a quick-and-dirty fix. The leak will inevitably come back again, so why not just fix it the right way the first time? Whenever you can, supplement the fix with technology so you can free up even more time for valuable activities, like analysis, exception management, other improvements, or training. You probably don’t need a robust, expensive application (they often cause leaks themselves!). Often there are clever niche solutions that can automate all kinds of common tasks (that’s why we built the XLEV8 Add-in!).
How leaks get worse over time
For an example of how the cost of time leaks gets worse over time, take a quick look at the chart below. It shows a typical example where time leaks are about 10% of the total time spent by employees. Two things happen over the next five years:
- The leaks get worse a little at a time, due to apathy and growing complexity
- The cost of leaked time increases due to inflation
Over the course of five years, the cost of leaked time increases 23.8%! Again, the opposite can be true. If you address time leaks, the time saved has a compounding effect when you reinvest it into other time-saving initiatives.
Summary
Time leaks are prevalent – denying that could be a major mistake. They tend to grow over time in extent, volume and cost. Address them by identifying them, prioritizing them, and fixing them. Use it as a catalyst for continuous improvement. Efficiency and accountability are enhanced and both make for great strategic advantages!
Do you have any best practices for fixing leaks or any leak horror stories? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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