Staff time analysis

In a perfect world, sales and customer-facing staff would spend 100% of their work time generating revenue for your business. But this isn’t possible in the real world. A costed snapshot of time spent on non-revenue generating activities could help deliver existing sales with fewer people or, alternatively, to grow sales with the current headcount.

Time

As staff costs are a major expense, it’s essential that this money is being spent effectively. A Staff Time Analysis will help you identify and cost time spent by sales and customer-facing staff that is non-revenue generating.

Our document allows you to record the main categories of unproductive sales and customer-facing time with the percentage of time spent against each category by staff level. If your business operates a time-recording system, it will be easier for you to analyse staff time spent on revenue generation and other tasks. If your business doesn’t record time, you will probably need to carry out a survey to gather the necessary information.

Ask your sales and customer-facing staff not only to record their revenue generating time (as a percentage of their total time at work, but also to analyse their: (1) “unproductive customer-facing time” into: report writing, error correction, research, e-mails, phone calls, travel and “other”; and (2) “non-revenue generating time” into internal administration, meetings, staff development, staff management and dealing with e-mails and telephone calls etc.

Cost

Your staff time analysis should also provide a costed snapshot of time spent on the activities identified above. To acheive this all you need to do is input an annual cost for each employee into the calculator. The spreadsheet does the rest.

You could go on from here to: (1) rank items by cost to the business so that you can highlight these to the board; (2) drill down into each of the major cost areas so that you can understand where most unnecessary time is being spent. The objective is to eliminate these and so find extra revenue generating time.