U.S. transport and logistics businesses are losing $7.7 billion annually in middle managers’ wasted time, according to research commissioned by SafetyCulture with YouGov.
The fifth annual Feedback from the Field report found that those in middle management roles in transport and logistics spend, on average, an estimated 5.52 hours every week picking up low-value or unnecessary tasks.
“It’s a trend we see too often across the frontline: managers become buried in admin or manual work that could be automated, instead of having the time and headspace to drive efficiency on the road and in the warehouse,” says Sam Byrnes, industry lead at SafetyCulture. “Managers have a unique vantage point – they know the strategic plans of senior leadership and the realities on the frontline. This makes them a hugely valuable source of business insight, but one that's often overlooked.”
Key takeaways:
· Attending unnecessary meetings, managing rosters and filling out paperwork are the Top 3 tasks managers say take up most of their time and distract them from more important duties.
· Transport and logistics were found to be the most impacted by inefficiency of the five frontline sectors studied, compared to 5.46 hours a week of wasted managers’ time in manufacturing, 5.01 hours in construction, 4.97 hours in retail, and 4.58 hours in hospitality.
· Almost all managers (98%) have ideas that could improve their organization, but just over half (59%) have actually had these ideas implemented. The leading reasons for ideas being rejected are that “senior leadership aren’t receptive to ideas from managers” (40%) and competing priorities (40%).
· Instead, transport managers say top-down improvement programs in their organization “create additional workload without clear benefits” and are “driven by people who don’t understand how the work is done.”
· Where managers’ ideas are taken forward, they report positive impacts such as improved workflow (51%), more efficient operations (50%) and better quality outputs (50%).
