When it comes to corporations arguing that they lose money through a zillion tiny work “losses” such as employees checking their personal e-mail and then conclude megabuck losses as the consequence you really have to look at the equation rationally and ask whether fixing the cause of the loss would actually make the complainant better off.
The whole idea of assessing loss based on aggregating “quanta” as in: “Our employees on average spend 15 minutes per day in non-work-related surfing and we have 2,000 employees at an average cost of $70 per hour so that means we”re losing $35,000 per day or around $7 million dollars per annum! Something must be done!” or even better “Windows takes 5 minutes to boot so that costs us $11,600 per day in wasted in employee time!” simply doesn’t make sense. You can’t aggregate the time lost across multiple employees as if it could be used as a whole. Having one million toothpicks doesn”t mean you have a tree, it means you have one million toothpicks. Even arguing that some time loosing activity performed by a single employee multiple times per day can be resolved to not “loose” the time is silly when you’re talking about durations of a few minutes. The problem is that wasted quanta of time can’t be converted into productive time. In most corporations worker’s effectiveness still isn’t assessed on whether they are actually doing their job but rather whether they appear to be doing so. Until your organization manages by objectives rather than by time keeping you will never be efficient or understand your costs and productivity.
