British offices are drowning in internal meetings and e-mails, which costs the UK economy up to £255 million a day. The shock news comes from research released today by NationalField, the private social network for enterprise and organisations that helped President Obama to the White House.
The study exposes how British workers are bogged down by their own colleagues:
· around a quarter (23.3%) of UK office workers spend up to three hours a day in internal meetings or sending emails to colleagues
· nearly three quarters (73%) of UK office workers admit they have either hunted for work already done by colleagues or, when they can’t find it, had to re-do the work themselves
· one in five (18%) claim they have to do this every single day of their working lives
· the average number of internal emails received per day is 32, but one in five (19%) say they receive up to 50 a day – that’s an email from a colleague every eight and half minutes over the course of a seven-hour working day.
The research reveals a major conflict between levels of feedback managers believe they give, and what employees say they receive. Nearly a third of managers (29%) claim to give their teams daily feedback, yet only 13% of staff state that this is actually the case, with the financial and manufacturing sectors experiencing this most severely.
In fact, one in five (18%) British workers say they never get any feedback from their boss. National Field CEO Edward Saatchi said: “By the time UK workers have finished their internal meetings and re-done work that their colleagues have already finished, they’ve still got less than ten minutes before the next internal email distracts them. “It’s little wonder the UK’s productivity is so poor, but just imagine what office workers could do if they were empowered to get the right information from each other in real time and actually had time to speak to people who weren’t colleagues – their company’s customers for starters.”
The news comes hot on the heels of Office for National Statistics figures that show the UK's productivity is down on its major competitors, and will be an extra worry for bosses already struggling to find ways of making their staff work smarter.