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Meanwhile, you can make savings within the enterprise without implementing any major organizational changes. The key approach is to analyse the processes and identify those that make money leak out of the company budget.

One of the areas worth considering is the use of the working time by employees. As it turns out, a company employing 500 people may lose over 1 million PLN per year due to the working time waste.

The working time bottleneck: where do the hours and the money disappear?

TIMATE, the manufacturer of the time and attendance system, analysed the behaviours of employees in several large companies from the sectors of production and logistics. The yearlong project revealed areas in which an employer can make savings effectively. These savings can be considerable, as an average employee wastes 460 minutes of the working time per month. When comparing the initial results (at the start of the analysis) with the final results (after one year of using the TIMATE system), it may be concluded that the abuses and costs related to the use of the working time can be significantly reduced.

Importantly, TIMATE analysed only the time that employees are contractually obliged to devote to work. The analysis excluded the statutory breaks.

What do employees do at work when they do not work?

1. A cigarette break

20% of the wasted working time, i.e. 90 minutes per month on average, cover the cigarette breaks. TIMATE’s analysis shows that the advanced working time monitoring (not only exits/entrances, but also employees’ behaviours during their working hours) allows to reduce this time by up to 78%.

2. Leaving for private purposes

13% of the time for which the employer pays and in which the employee does not work cover the situations of leaving the company premises for private purposes. The enterprises under analysis managed to eliminate this problem completely by using cutting-edge technologies.

3. Meals

As it turned out, employees spend more time on their meals than it is specified in the labour code. To be precise, it is additional 60 minutes per month. This can be reduced by up to 92% per month.

4. Unauthorized overtime

A major problem faced by employers is the unauthorized overtime, i.e. the working time that goes beyond the employee’s contractual working hours. Much of this overtime is not agreed upon with the managers, which means that employees stay longer, but they do not do any work during this time. On average, this overtime is one hour per one employee per month. This issue can be completely eliminated, as shown by the example of the businesses analysed by TIMATE.

5. Entrance and exit

It would seem that entering and exiting the company premises should not take up much time. Meanwhile, it turns out that these actions may cover a large amount of minutes on a monthly basis. Time is wasted in the queues to the turnstiles and on talks in the cloakroom. The time at the gates can be reduced by 87% by using the automatic time and attendance system.

6. Ineffective time

The analysis reveals that an average employee wastes 90 minutes per month on simply doing nothing. The businesses under analysis managed to reduce this figure by 67%.

7. Shorter actual working time

Leaving early or arriving late result in a situation when an employee spends less time at work than specified in the contract. This issue can be completely resolved.

Better work organization: savings at your fingertips

460 minutes per month may seem unimpressive. However, it is enough to translate this figure into money in order to see the scale of the losses.

Let’s assume that an employer pays the average of 0.47 PLN for one minute of work. A company employing 500 people loses over 100,000 PLN on wasted working time per month, i.e. over 1 million PLN per year. This is a huge amount of money, explains Sebastian Młodziński, TIMATE’s CEO. By analysing employees’ behaviours, it is possible to identify the causes of waste and react accordingly. In consequence, a company can optimize the work and divide the tasks among its employees more effectively. This will, of course, boost its performance.

A more effective team will be able to carry out more tasks and the company will earn more without recruiting new people. This is one of the ways that businesses can use to face the present economic challenges and come out victorious.

TIMATE analysed the working time use in the businesses that decided to implement the system. When the system started operating, an average employee wasted 460 minutes per month. It was the time which should have been devoted to tasks and duties. TIMATE did not include the statutory breaks in the analysis. Only the time which the employees were obliged to use for work-related purposes was considered (i.e. after deducting the time for breaks).

Both we and the business owners could hardly believe what we saw in the measurement results. A record-breaking employee in one company wasted as much as 50% of his working time. In other words, he received one half of his salary for doing nothing. As we are now facing an economic crisis, no manager can afford to spend the company money in such a way, says Sebastian Młodziński, TIMATE’s CEO.

When wasting time instead of working, most employees did the following: they went for a cigarette break (90 minutes per each employee per month on average), they left work for reasons unrelated to their duties or tasks (60 minutes), they had meals and meetings at the cafeteria or the cloakroom (90 minutes). It was also revealed that the employers paid for unauthorized overtime (60 minutes per each employee per month on average) and for the time that the employees did not spend at work, because they left early or arrived late (20 minutes).

I would not go so far as to say that employees waste their working time deliberately. Of course, such things happen. However, in many cases the long breaks, leaving the office or the factory or simply doing nothing during working hours result from the ineffective division of tasks among employees. Some of them have too much on their hands, while others have too little to do within their contractual working hours. TIMATE allows to analyse the division of tasks and the task performance time, which makes it easier to optimize the business operations and increase their effectiveness, adds Sebastian Młodziński.

More effective work translates into actual savings. In the cases under analysis, the initial parameters could be significantly improved thanks to TIMATE and the monitoring of entrances and exits and of what the employees actually did during the working hours. Within one year, the time devoted to activities unrelated to work was reduced by 80% on average. The following issues were completely eliminated: leaving work for private reasons, unauthorized overtime and situations when employees spent less time at work than specified in their contracts.

Additionally, the cigarette break time was reduced by 78%, the meal time by 92%, and the exit and entrance time (e.g. queues to the turnstiles) by 87%.

At the beginning of our analysis, the enterprises paid each employee for the average of 460 minutes of not working per month. If a company employed 500 people, it generated losses exceeding one hundred thousand PLN per month. During a year this amount exceeded 1 million PLN. TIMATE made it possible to reduce the expenses on empty hours by 80%, concludes Sebastian Młodziński.

The analysis was performed in large businesses from the sectors of production and logistics from mid-2019 to mid-2020.