Traditional managers often lack the skills required to understand if an intranet is successful or not.
If utilized correctly, the intranet could save staff time and make things easier. If you can save 5 minutes from one task, imagine the overall domino effect that impact your whole operation.
It is management’s job to manage time effectively. Properly managed, those 5 minutes could help make another sale or help a customer solve a problem. But because of a poorly designed intranet this time can be lost every time a staff member needed to complete this task.
Organizations are simply not structured to allow for time management when that time runs across the organization. Managers manage within the framework of departments or units. They also tend to be obsessed with head count rather than efficiency.
Let’s say that Organization A has 10,000 employees. Let’s say each employee does a particular task on average 25 times a year. Let’s say it takes 5 minutes longer than it should because it’s badly managed. This is costing the organization 1.25 million minutes a year in lost productivity. That’s 21,000 hours. Or 520 working weeks, per year. That’s 10 workers per year. It’s significant.
By improving this task you can save the entire organization 10 workers per year; but that doesn’t necessarily mean firing anybody. What it does mean is making the entire workforce more efficient, more effective and more productive.
Most managers will not be very impressed. They want to know which 10 people they can fire. Otherwise it’s not real savings, not real efficiency. But you can’t fire everybody. Surely it is still logical and practical to make sure that those employees who are still left with the organization can do their jobs more efficiently. Shouldn’t management also have a role there?
The origin of management, was about making the tasks factory workers carried out on a day-to-day basis more efficient. However, when management pioneer Frederick Taylor said that he could make the job of shoveling coal faster and easier, he was initially met with skepticism.
The intranet is the factory of the information worker. And it’s not in a very good state at the moment. No organization would allow its physical factories to be managed with the level of messiness, carelessness, confusion, waste content, and general untidiness that occurs daily on most intranets.
There is a much better way; focus on time and efficiency.