Business Operations Today
The Lack of Time

If the loss of operational efficiency is the price most businesses pay for the lack of Business Process Definition, then time is the currency that pays for it.

Most businesses use up every last man-hour just taking care of the daily details of keeping the business running. This is especially true for small businesses. Of course, no business is going to maintain a staffing level where employees have extra time on their hands. It wouldn't be financially efficient. But since most Business Processes experience a fair level of variation and error, there has to be a variable in the Process to deal with it. That variable is almost always the owner's and employee's time. Too often, we see extra hours being spent handling the outcome of inconsistency and error in a business's Processes. If you think that this doesn't have a hidden cost of it's own on a business's efficiency, then your wrong. People have emotional responses to tasks that play a huge role in attainable efficiency. When a person knows that their personal time represents the only water to throw on a fire, it makes it much more difficult to be enthusiastic and creative about what they do.

So time becomes the ultimate business catch-22. Most business processes are thrown together by whatever means available with existing resources no matter how cumbersome they are and that's the way they stay indefinitely. As a result, they are time consuming to manage and eat up all the available man-hours. If there's never enough time to rethink HOW you do things and implement improvements to raise the efficiency, then you never free up time to think about HOW you do things and on it goes. Large businesses can afford to hire staff to address operational issues and it does help. But there are some major obstacles to ultra high performance that this approach does not overcome. The most significant is that the best sources for creativity and Process improvement are the people that execute the Process on a regular basis. If those people only have enough time to execute the Process and fight fires then there's a vast resource that most businesses never tap. To tap this resource, there has to be time for improvement and an infrastructure that promotes it. So just as the lack of time can be a downward spiraling catch-22 because of poorly designed Processes, freeing up time for improvement with the right methods and environment can start an upward spiral that launches a business into a performance level rarely seen.

The first step to evolving into a high performance business, where operations are concerned, is to make a commitment to ongoing improvement.