We grown-ups like to quantify things in numbers, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry charmingly observes in The Little Prince: “If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!””
So, it is no wonder that any fighter against inefficiency in the workplace is often confronted with the demand for quantification of productivity gains. How much is Email Overload costing our company? How much can we save if we eliminate it, in full or in part? There is no perfect answer to these questions, because knowledge worker productivity is notoriously hard to measure (more on this in a future post). How can you provide a figure?
A common approach is to estimate the time wasted on IO and multiply by the average salary in the company to derive a total cost figure. These figures tend to run very high; Basex, a New York analyst firm, famously placed the cost to the US economy at $900B (yes, Billion) a year, derived from a waste of over a day per week per worker. There are a number of questions this leaves open: how do you quantify the time loss? And what will happen if you recover the time? Will productivity (output per employee) soar, or will people just work less, or go home earlier (not a bad thing in itself, in the long term)?
Then there’s the fact that time loss is just the tip of the iceberg, as I and my colleagues showed in an article a while back. The damages of Info Overload go beyond time waste: working in “Continuous partial attention” reduces creativity and innovation, increases error rates, reduces managerial decision quality, and stresses people to the point of illness. So, focusing on the easier to quantify time loss ignores what may well be higher costs: how do you even begin to measure the cost of not having come up with a critical invention? How do you assess the long term effect of employee burnout?
My own approach is to avoid a dollar figure, and instead I always share with my audiences and clients the full picture. I give the time loss – in hours, not dollars – as a lower limit; we know enough to have a fairly good idea of that number. If their employees are wasting about a day per week, you don’t need the math to realize it would be a good idea to plug this time sink. Then I explain the other loss areas one by one, with enough research data to give the listener an idea of the problem’s magnitude, rather than a dollars and cents number. This way, I find, people tend to “get it” without sidetracking into secondary arguments.
What would you say? Is this more or less effective than attempting a precise calculation?
