From past few days I was wondering about average time an employee in IT-Industry (entry-level or 1-2 years experienced) spends working on projects/modules. And the time which he/she spends sitting idle in office and doing nothing or some work which is unproductive or not adding any value to the company.
I did some research on google and the results were shocking. A survey conducted by 24/7 wallst and salary.com shows the reason for idle time/wasted time during work hours:
1. Don’t have enough work to do (33.2%)
2. Underpaid for amount of work (23.4%)
3. Co-workers distract me (14.7%)
4. Not enough after-work time (12.0%)
5. Other (16.7%)
According to a Salary.com follow-up survey of Human Resource managers, companies assume that employees will waste 0.94 hours per day. They take this into account when they do their compensation planning. However, those managers privately suspect that employees waste 1.6 hours per day. In fact, employees admit to wasting 2.09 hours per day if they are on a project. And if not the whole 8 hours can be considered as waste.
The overall effect of this idleness is increased cost of Software products. Which in turn is increasing IT-Budget for their customers. So whats the solution ??
Let me suggest some, don't know about the feasibility part though. :)
Here I am not going to suggest them to install employee monitoring software and restrict computer activities that are not work-related such as instant messengers, online games, installers, social networks, etc. Its not only about computer activities its about the overall idle or non-productive time an employee spends in a day. And it also does not depend on whether they have project or not. Many time it has been seen that the project which could have been done in 30 days took 3 months or so. I do agree that the time wastage is due to a lot of reasons including mentioned above and controlling them will reduce it, but here I am concerned about the idleness due to no-work.
The point is why they've hired more employees than needed?? Can't it be done with less or no employees.
The point is why do they have this much full term employees when the work can be done effectively with short term or employees which works on hourly basis. How?
(these are some raw thoughts, i've no idea where it will go but i think there is a huge potential in this area)
Discard the concept of full time developers or 8 hours work a day.
The Method:
- Divide the project into small tiny modules,
- Decide amount given and expected time to finish the module
- Create a platform (preferably web based) where these modules can be developed, 've to build an infrastructure for seamless collaboration
- Let the job-seekers (anyone with a set of required skill-set in the market) bid for the modules (bidding will be time based)
- Lowest bidder(or whoever you choose based on skill-set) will win the module and work with other module-winners of same project.
- On completion of module they will get money.
Industries on which this concept can be applied:
- Companies developing web-based applications (e.g. Zoho)
- Companies developing mobile applications (e.g. MoFirst)
- Companies developing social-networking apps/games (e.g. OxyLabs )
note: Dont have ny idea if this concept be extended to big IT Companies. :(
Put Employees in Open Source Projects -
Its an old and already implemented solution, but i think is effective since employees will gain different skill-set and utilizing open source technologies cheap solutions can be developed. Here is some examples.
IBM has transformed its business models to accommodate, even encourage, open source
Even microsoft is ready to contribute in open-source and has already setup the infrastructure
.
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