Top 10 Job Site Time Wasters

When you're running a company, it's easy to get caught up in business logistics: marketing to new leads, maintaining a functional website, soliciting customer reviews. Obviously, the importance of these responsibilities cannot be overstated. But focusing solely on expanding your clientele can cause business owners to overlook one of the most vital keys to success: job site productivity. Are your employees realizing their potential? Or are inefficient practices getting in the way of their productivity? Here are some common job site mistakes that are costing you time and money. 

1. Lacking a clear plan to start the morning.
Your team might be at the job site bright and early, but if there's no set plan for where to begin, they're going to get a slow start. Having a clearly outlined set of daily objectives will prepare your employees for a productive work day and keep them from standing around and twiddling their thumbs. 

2. Sharing equipment.
Sharing may be caring, but it has no place in a productive workplace. Be sure all of your workers have their own, well-organized set of tools. Otherwise, employees will misuse time by looking for lost equipment or, worse yet, by borrowing tools that belong to other people. 

3. Ambiguous or nonexistent job budgets.
Here, we're talking about budgeting time. It's crucial that you provide your team with a coherent and realistic schedule for the day's work. If employees don't know how long it should take to complete a given task, they might work more slowly than anticipated, which means reduced productivity and impatient customers. 

4. Confusing paperwork.
This goes along with our first point. Not only should your workers know where to start; they should also know where to end. If the team does not fully understand the scope of the job, they could end up making mistakes and costing you money. For example, if there is no paperwork indicating which areas of a job site are to be painted, employees may cover the wrong wall, and you'll wind up having to account for lost time and lost materials. Save yourself these limited resources by drafting a detailed description of what's included in the job. 

5. Clocking in at the end of the week.
This might not seem like a big deal – you're not paying your workers daily, so what difference does it make when they record their hours? If you allow employees to submit timecards at the end of the work week rather than the end of the day, there is a greater possibility that the hours will be inaccurate. People may not remember their hours exactly, or they might see an opportunity to fudge them a bit. This could increase time theft and decrease the overall productivity of your business. 

6. Taking lunch breaks away from the job site.
Of course, people need to eat – nobody is productive when they're hungry. Unfortunately, productivity tends to be considerably less after lunch, especially if the break is taken somewhere other than the job site. Leaving the job location makes it easier for employees to exit "work mode" and waste company time by fooling around. Keep your guys on-task and focused on the job at hand by requiring that they eat their lunch on-site. 

7. Smoking.
It goes without saying that smoke breaks are a huge time waster. Workers should only smoke during their personal free time, not on the job (and especially not while completing a task). Multiple smoke breaks add up quickly, and this could mean hours of valuable company time being thrown away.

8. Cell phones.
These days, with cellular devices practically fused into people's hands, it's getting more and more difficult to turn them off and put them away. The minutes your employees spend talking, texting, and checking Facebook on the job might not seem like a substantial amount of time, but when you consider the work they could be doing during those minutes, it suddenly appears more problematic. Have your workers turn off their cell phones entirely or limit their phone conversations to emergency situations. 

9. Inefficient clean-up strategies.
Clean-up should be approached proactively, not reactively. Ensure you are making the most of company time by establishing effective strategies for keeping your work area tidy. You might have to spend fifteen minutes putting out drop cloths, but this will save you the hour it would have taken to clean up paint drips and debris. 

10. Poor workplace culture.
One of the greatest time wasters is simply a bad attitude. If your employees are only there for the paycheck, they're not going to work as hard as they would if they felt genuinely motivated. Make the work environment more welcoming. Ask how people are doing, get to know your team, and praise people for a job well-done. You'll find that happy workers are the most productive workers.

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