How Many Hours a Week Do your Employees Actually WORK?

Unfortunately, it’s no longer just frowned upon to force your employees to work 80 hours a week, while paying them for 40. I guess it’s also illegal…thanks a lot OSHA! The good old days are over, and the reality is a very large percentage of the work week is spent NOT working. I have determined, with all the distractions and interruptions, the average employee end ups working approximately 15 hours of a traditional 40 hour week…and that’s on weeks they actually show up to work everyday.

The frustration starts with the plethora of ridiculous excuses for not coming in to work.  Oh, there are a few legitimate reasons I can empathize with:  The occasional Monday morning hangover that feels like your head is about to explode and your intestines are overflowing with a fluid that could not possibly be human. Just the thought of being more than a few feet away from your own toilet could cause an “accident” that would define the rest of your professional career.  To this day, I’m still traumatized by a sales manager who came in to work and “sharted” in his white pants. I can also understand an employee’s kids getting them sick. They are revolting little germ factories that come home from school infected with viruses (some the CDC has yet to even classify) that make the H1N1 flu look like a minor sniffle. On those days, I wish they would do us all a favor and NOT come into the office. All they’re going to do is whine about how sick they are and contaminate the rest of the staff with both the highly contagious lung oysters they’re hacking up, and the disgusting green snot that’s pouring out of their nostrils.

However, on the days your employees actually show up to work, they don’t seem to spend much time actually WORKING! Every morning I get proof of this as I review a phone report from the previous day’s activity. The report is generated from a sophisticated call accounting software program that calculates every imaginable variable, but most importantly, each employees total phone time for the day. The daily average phone time per employee is less than 2 hours (and that of course includes personal calls), and 70% of my staff are inside salespeople that make their living being on the phone! You would think, with all of the recent advancements in technology, employees would be able to work more efficiently and get more done in fewer hours. There are phone systems that dial for you, CRM’s to keep you organized, and every part of the sales process is fully automated… yet still people are way less productive.

The internet is without a doubt the single most important business tool of our generation, but it is also the single biggest distraction in the work place. Googling how to make a bong out of an apple, posting dim-witted comments on friends Facebook accounts, looking up quotes from the movie the Hangover on IMDB, and watching the 400-pound-fat lady with no teeth falling off the table while singing Oops!…I Did it Again on Youtube… may all be entertaining but its not working, it’s jerking off.  Factor in smoke breaks, coffee breaks, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks, walk breaks, personal time breaks and breaks to clear their heads and it’s astonishing that anything ever gets done!

So before your employees miss even more work due to yet another night of being intoxicated or because their little rodent got them sick again, maybe they could consider the following: Not getting so hammered every night so that their immune systems can adequately function, occasionally using some hand sanitizer, and possibly going to sleep before 4 AM on weekdays. And on the days they actually do make it in to work, instead of screwing around all day…actually WORK!  That way, when I sign their paycheck, I don’t feel like I paid a ton of money to sit courtside at a Laker game, and after an amazing first quarter, Kobe Bryant decides to sit out the rest of the game because he is distracted by the bouncing boobs and shiny tops the Lakers girls are wearing.