Avoiding Small Losses in Daily Productivity Can Improve Your Bottom Line In a Big Way

Yes, the subject line of this post seems absurd. What respectable project manager would let their employees and contractors consume valuable time that should be used more productively than on an extra long lunch break every day?

Sure, everyone understands the above example, but why do so many people ignore other productivity wasters that can be found hiding in plain sight in nearly every organization?

A recent whitepaper by CAD industry analyst Robert Green took issue with some common productivity challenges related to managing shared files in multi-site architecture, engineering and construction firms. Robert analyzed a company with four offices, 100 CAD users and four CAD coordinators that annually loses over $100,000 in productivity related to managing shared project files over a WAN connection. It is a very eye-opening analysis.

When comparable organizations are confronted with this scenario their reactions vary from committing to finding a solution, to attempting to rationalize the problem away. Some favorites include:

• “Those aren’t actual losses as the employees were already paid for.”

• “That has been going on for a long time and it has become accepted.”

• “We tried to fix it before and failed, and decided it is cheaper to do nothing.”

If that’s the case, why not let your employees take an extra 30 minutes for lunch?

The answer is simply that you can do something to manage how long your employees take for lunch, and to improve how efficiently your employees can share and collaborate with their project files. The best part is your people will thank you for helping improve the quality of their work life, even without a longer lunch break.

You can read the full analysis and story in The Ultimate Guide to CAD File Collaboration by Robert Green.