One of the biggest costs to any business occurs when they are losing hours of time for no obvious reason. If the saying is true and time is literally money, any wasted time could literally mean the difference between profits and loss.

Those lost hours of productivity have to be going somewhere and you, as the business owner, are responsible for figuring out where. Rather than playing an endless game of detective, here are a few areas that might be the cause of where there’s a gap in your numbers…

#1 – Employee Chatter

Any boss who tries to instil an “all work, no play” policy on their employees is not a boss that is going to have happy employees. It makes sense to keep the rules somewhat relaxed and remember that the people that work for you are just that – people, not mindless robot drones.

However, there needs to be some agreement of when the fun stops and everyone puts their heads down and gets to work. You should always given your staff some leeway, but if they try and take it too far, it’s something you have to clamp down on. Hopefully, they will see that you’re trying to do what’s right by them by giving them the ability to be more social during working hours… but they need to reward your faith by working hard when required, too. If they don’t, it might be necessary to investigate further disciplinary measures.

#2 – Faulty Equipment

Your business is – hopefully – a finely tuned machine, humming along with itself, the cogs always greased and turning smoothly. That’s the idea anyway; if you don’t keep on top of maintenance, then you might find time slipping.

The most irritating part of this problem is that even a small slippage in the accuracy of your machine or network can make a huge difference. A couple of seconds late on when a project was meant to begin, or one faulty clock reading – it’s enough to eventually add up to hours of lost productivity. To ensure everything is running as it should be, ensure you make an annual appointment with calibration specialists so you can be sure everything is running as it should be.

#3 – Bad Record Keeping

If one of your employees suddenly has to pause in what they are doing to double-check or amend a record, then that’s a few seconds – so no big deal. Or they might have to chase up an invoice or grab notes on an order, which again, is a few minutes work – so no big deal.

Individually, poor record keeping doesn’t have that much of an impact. When you add all of those lost seconds and minutes together over the course of a week, however, then it’s not long until they become problematic. Over the course of a year, even just losing ten minutes a week to poor record keeping could slowly but surely add up to hours and hours of lost time. That’s going to have an impact on your bottom line. It’s therefore imperative that you instil proper record keeping practices in all employees and ensure they are adhered to.