How Much is Lost Productivity Costing Your Business? (Infographic)

by Nathan Roberson May 9, 2016

May 9, 2016

In the modern rush to create the ultimate corporate culture to attract top talent, businesses and entrepreneurs have begun introducing more distractions into the workplace (ping pong tables and shuffleboards, anyone?) seemingly without consideration for the potential cost of lost productivity.

One might argue that a happy worker is a productive worker, and studies have been conducted to prove this theory true.

However, there is very little argument that full blown “goofing-off” does any good at all. An employee who is general so disengaged that they not only think nothing of wasting their own time but other’s time as well is not going to increase productivity no matter how many ping pong paddles you ply her with.

This Infographic from Do My LLC strives to assign a dollar amount to the actual time that a habitual lack of productivity can cost an organization annually (scroll to the bottom for a chart that has data points based on yearly salary).

Time is money: the true cost of goofing off at work Infographic

The data point about 69% of workers admit to wasting time at work comes from a Salary.com survey where people were asked to fess up to their time wasting activities and enumerate their own individual time sucks that they encountered day to day.

I find it rather fascinating that people would actually admit to this stuff. According to the survey some (2% or so) even divulged that they regularly wasted up to 5 hours a day which is kind of unbelievable. How does one even get away with that much slacking off? If you extrapolate the data points within this Infographic to a person who waste 5 hours a day at work, that means that (if that person made 50k a year) their lack of productivity would cost the company (annually) $ 32,370.52, a full three-quarters of that person’s annual take home.

I don’t know about you, but that number would make me seriously want to reconsider the inclusion of too many shuffleboard tables around the office if I were in charge.

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