Time and motion study??

beetlebailey

Quick question...........during our monthly meeting our manager produced a pie chart breaking down how as a team we spend our day, we repair equipment so it showed stuff like incoming/outing emails/ phone calls etc.....

It was based on previous month and it turns out that 40% of our time is unaccounted for!

So just want to know can this be done without our knowledge??

d.pop

beetlebailey wrote: »

Quick question...........during our monthly meeting our manager produced a pie chart breaking down how as a team we spend our day, we repair equipment so it showed stuff like incoming/outing emails/ phone calls etc.....

It was based on previous month and it turns out that 40% of our time is unaccounted for!

So just want to know can this be done without our knowledge??

Why not? Every business keeps or should keep productivity info to enable them to improve their business.
There is a whole industry grown up around this known often simply as "Lean".
Personally I attend daily Lean meetings within my industry where everybody is held to account, fine when you get used to it. First few are hard alright.

Usually when setting out you will find that employees have not been allocating their time correctly, e.g. Spending 30mins on phone to a client and not recording that time correctly, or more often, several shorter calls over a day that still add up to quite a bit of time.

Do you think the management have done somebody dodgy..?

Peregrinus

Hard to know without a detailed account of what you do, and how. But presumably to the extent that your work involves the use of technology, the technology itself can record, or be monitored so as to record, what it is being used for, and for how long, and it may well be that this is done in a non-invasive way so that you don't necessarily notice it happening. Your phone, for example, probably logs all calls, the length, whether incoming or outgoing, the duration of each call, the start time, etc. They are simply collating the information for the purposes of their time-and-motion study, but the information has in fact always been collected. Similarly with your computer, and quite possible with other machinery or appliances that you use.

The 40% of unaccounted time may simply represent time you spend on tasks which don't involve the use of technology, and so are not easily recorded.

beetlebailey

Not too bothered either way just abit surprised at how they went about it. It came totally out of the blue with no history of the company doing one before.

Irish_Elect_Eng

Depending on your mix of tasks 40% unaccounted for might not be a bad result. There is a lot of waste associated with motion: moving between tasks and waiting: the time before you can commence on a task and rework: the time spent redoing work that was not right first time.

If you feel that there is some implication that you are not focusing on the right tasks, i would suggest that you keep a personal log of how you are spending your time. Then you will have an accurate picture for yourself and be able to speak to the 40% in your case. I did this for a month myself as a manager and I was shocked at the amount of waste in my work-day.

In general 5-S and lean improve the work environment.

beauf

Time and motion can be misleading. You might have one person who take 10 phone calls and 4 hours to fix one problem. Someone else might take 4 phone calls and fix 10 problems. There needs to be some measure of output. Also one problem might be complex another easy so perhaps 1 difficult job might take longer then 10 easy jobs. Some people work these kinda metrics to their advantage, taking all the quick easy jobs, leaving someone else to do the longer more difficult one. The statistics measured might not reflect this.

I would find out what metrics they are using, and what they want to see. Then adjust your work practises to suit. Its also worth keeping a personal log of work done, time spent. Even if its a few lines in a diary, or a txt file on a computer. Its not unusual in my experience for places to ask for this information months later. Then its impossible to recreate. Its also useful as a memory aid. Quite often someone might have written up time spent incorrectly and its always useful to be able to correct them from your own records.