Chapter 19

The Distraction Index

TYPES OF ORGANIZATIONS WHERE THIS METRIC IS APPROPRIATE

Small organizations or those with low labor costs compared to total operating expenses probably should not bother with this metric. In a small business, there is no time for all these distractions, and employees and managers tend to spend most of their time on overall job responsibilities. Large corporations, universities, and government organizations tend to have high payroll costs and to be the worst at distracting their employees with administrative duties and management programs. Hospitals and other types of health care organizations could probably benefit from a metric like this but slightly modified. One hospital I worked with just asked people to track their time in two categories: delivering health care and other. Most of what comprised the “other” category had to do with filling out paperwork to get paid. Of course, there are hundreds of people whose jobs in a hospital have only indirect links to the delivery of health care, so this metric might only apply to the doctors, nurses, technicians, and others who are the direct health care providers.

Organizations with a flat organizing structure will also find little use for this data. In these organizations where there are only a few layers between workers and the senior leaders, the vast majority of the staff are focused on major job responsibilities. For example, a call center I worked with has about 85 percent of its staff on the phone as either individual customer service representatives or supervisors who also take tough calls. They can’t take big groups of people off the phones for meetings and special programs, so they probably would not need to have the distraction index on their corporate scorecard.

HOW DOES THIS IMPACT PERFORMANCE?

The distraction index is a leading indicator of many different output and outcome measures. If employees are distracted from focusing on their main job responsibilities, it will impact:

• Productivity and efficiency
• Quality
• Customer service
• Costs
• Profits
• Turnover
• Employee engagement

The most immediate impact of having employees distracted from their primary jobs is that it affects their level of engagement. I prefer not to do surveys to measure engagement, because they can only be done once or twice a year and many of them include ridiculous questions like, “Do you agree with the company vision and understand it?” or “Can you see how your job helps contribute to the company mission?” or “Does your boss model the company values in his or her behavior?” The answer to all of these questions is obviously “yes.” Most employees are very frustrated by having to spend more and more of their workday on what they probably view as activities that are a waste of time. If you want your employees to be engaged, make sure they are in the right job and make sure they spend most of their time doing their job. If you are intent on measuring engagement via a survey like Gallup does, I encourage you to continue with this, but look at it as an annual study, not a measure that is used to track and manage engagement on a weekly and monthly basis. You will probably find that engagement scores on your survey get better as you improve performance on the distraction index.

I recall working years ago for Discover Card in suburban Chicago, helping them develop a scorecard linked to their new strategic plan. When it came time to develop the People section of the scorecard, the typical measures of employee satisfaction and turnover were suggested. Then the tone of the meeting changed and everyone started getting engaged and emotional. I recall one guy who suggested, “We need a metric that tells senior management how much time people spend doing their jobs versus spending time on all these improvement initiatives we have around here like strategic planning, activity-based costing, business process improvement, and balanced scorecard.” Someone else chimed in: “Yeah, it’s not just these three-letter management programs, it’s all these administrative activities we have to spend time on like budget meetings, sexual harassment training, and other stuff—it’s getting out of hand.” Before I knew it, I thought I might have a mutiny on my hands, since I was one of the enemies, taking up their time with a balanced scorecard meeting. After listening to their comments, I realized that this was an important factor linked to organizational success. Organizations need to spend time doing things that make customers continue buying their products and services. After discussing this with the team, they agreed that some amount of these nonjob activities were necessary, but the majority of the group agreed that these activities were taking up too much of people’s workdays. The problem was no one had any data or facts—all we had were strong opinions and perceptions that too much time was spent on these activities. I suggested that a study possibly be done to determine the extent of the problem, but the group disagreed. “If we do a study that is a one-time event, it might lead to a temporary reduction in these programs or activities, but it would be short-lived. We need an ongoing performance measure that leaders can track every week and month. As soon as you kill one of these programs or activities, three new ones spring up.”

COST AND EFFORT TO MEASURE

This metric is extremely easy to measure and requires no additional costs. If employees already complete weekly or biweekly time sheets, data collection requires sorting time into several categories. If no one completes time sheets or records on time, then a time tracking system will need to be developed, which usually is a one-page form or electronic request for employees to submit their work hours sorted into predetermined categories.

HOW DO I MEASURE IT?

Data for the distraction index comes right from employees’ time sheets. Employees are asked to sort their time into three general categories:

In order to make it clear to employees, many organizations that have adopted this metric provide a one-page cheat sheet or job aid that helped people decide how to sort their time. For example, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), which is part of the army, provides employees with a two-column list of meetings, programs, training, and programs that fall into the categories of “Administration” and “Management Programs.”

Organizations like law firms, consultants, and engineering firms will find it very easy to track this data because it is basically unbillable hours. Hours billed to client projects are those associated with doing one’s primary job, whereas administrative time and participation in internal management programs cannot typically be charged to customers. Many of these firms require employees to track time in 10- to 15-minute intervals, so employees learn to become very adept at tracking their work activities. These types of firms tend to get highly accurate data to feed into the distraction index. Other types of organizations may require a new process of tracking time or filling out time sheets if this is not currently done. Asking people to do this once every two weeks is likely to produce inaccurate data, as employees are likely to forget what they did over the previous 10 days. If you need to start collecting time sheet data and have not done so in the past, I recommend only tracking activities or events that take at least an hour. Going from not filling out a time sheet to a system of recording time in 15-minute intervals will be too much to handle for most people, and they will view this task as just one more distraction.

FORMULA AND FREQUENCY

Most organizations track distraction levels on a weekly or biweekly basis or as often as employees submit time sheets. Only asking for data on a monthly basis is probably a waste of time, because most employees won’t keep good records and will just guess when filling out their time sheet. The formula is as follows:

The number is better expressed as a negative factor by showing the amount of time employees are distracted, because this tends to be more dramatic and gets more attention.

VARIATIONS

The most common way of calculating this index is to sort time into the three categories previously described. Other alternatives used by clients who adopted this index include:

• Billable versus unbillable time
• Job, training, administration, time off
• Job, regulatory and legal, other
• Client projects, marketing, admin

I have also seen the distraction index be one of the key metrics in an employee engagement index. This is quite logical, because being distracted from doing your job is a major frustration for most employees, and this is a measure that can easily be tracked every day and week, compared to surveys that can only be done a few times a year. Another variation is to use the distraction index as one of the submeasures in a productivity or efficiency index. Other measures might include outputs divided by labor-hours and labor cost divided by total cost.

TARGETS AND BENCHMARKS

Most clients that use this metric have a target range of people spending 70 to 80 percent of their time doing what they were hired for. In other words, no more than 10 to 15 percent of time should be spent on administrative activities, with the same amount of time spent participating in management and improvement programs. Targets for improvement should be based on current baseline levels, however. Several clients found that professionals and managers routinely spend only about a third of their time on regular job responsibilities, so they had a way to go to reach the targeted green zone of 70 percent job, 30 percent other.

BENEFITS OF DATA

There is always a cost in collecting data, but luckily this measure requires almost no cost or additional time from employees. Training employees to have the discipline to track their time at work accurately may require some patience, but it will quickly become a habit and you probably won’t get too much resistance from them. In fact, most are glad to track their time in these categories if the result is fewer management programs, meetings, and task forces and less time on administrative activities. The biggest benefit of having data on how employees spend their time is that you now have hard facts and data on the cumulative effect of all the programs and requirements that seem to exponentially increase as organizations grow larger. This is a good statistic to keep an eye on as you track growth in revenue, to make sure it does not get out of hand. Data from the distraction index may cause you to refrain from starting new initiatives, practices, or programs until others are completed or dropped. Data from this metric may also lead to the development of policies that minimize disruptions and distractions. For example, one large corporate client only allows one major management program at a time to be implemented. Every few years, the client implements a new program or process, and this has led to a long trend of improving performance as well as helping its employees avoid getting burned out. Employees have no choice but to participate in mandatory training and meetings and to complete paperwork required by payers or regulators. Filling out tax forms each year is an administrative chore we all have to do that distracts us from more important things.

Another important lesson to be learned from this data is that certain employees tend to participate in all the important improvement initiatives, whereas others don’t participate in any of them. Many of my clients have a core group of 20 to 30 people who always are the first to volunteer to work on improvement initiatives. This is great, since they are almost always highly competent people, but it is really not fair that others get to avoid these responsibilities. The participants are often overachiever types who still manage to get their job responsibilities done well. The fallout is that these people get burned out. Eventually the 60- to 70-hour weeks lead to health problems or problems with personal relationships. Data from the distraction index can be used to balance participation in improvement programs across the entire workforce, rather than having these programs completed by only a small minority of people. Lack of participation in any of the organization’s improvement initiatives is not a behavior you want to drive with this metric. Spending zero time on administration or management programs would not be considered healthy.

A distraction index that shows people are spending 30 percent or more of their time on nondirect job responsibilities means that employee engagement will tend to go down and stress levels will increase. The consequence of spending too little time on improvement programs or administrative requirements might be regulatory problems, lawsuits, and failure to meet improvement goals. All organizations need to spend some time on administration and on improvement. The key is to keep this time balanced with getting your job done. This measure helps you do just that.