How many hours does your business lose to inefficient processes?

Start with one real process and record where the time goes. A survey percentage cannot tell you which of your steps needs changing or how many hours you could recover. Separate time spent doing work from time spent waiting, then connect each finding to a row your team can check.

What can a survey tell you?

Webexpenses reported in a 2019 survey of more than 5,000 office workers that, by their own estimate, 26% of their working time goes on inefficient tasks. It concerned reported time on unproductive and inefficient tasks, not a timed audit of your business.

Treat a survey as context for a question, rather than a savings assumption. Respondents’ estimates, recorded task times and an experiment comparing a changed process are different kinds of evidence. A number from one does not automatically answer the question posed by another.

Do not add survey categories unless their definitions establish that they do not overlap. Time in a meeting can also be time spent dealing with an administrative problem. Adding labels without checking their boundaries can count the same interval twice.

Why is someone else’s average not your baseline?

Businesses differ in their processes, tools, roles and workload. Your team may spend time checking an incomplete order, waiting for approval or entering the same information again. A whole-workday estimate does not show which of those events occurs in your flow or which is avoidable.

For a business decision, define the process and collect evidence that matches it. Before using a percentage from an outside study, check its year, population and measurement method against the question you need answered.

A task that feels frustrating may be worth investigating, but frustration is not a measure of its duration. Ask the person doing it to show actual cases. Compare the account with the traces available in the tools, and keep any disagreement visible rather than choosing the more impressive number.

How can you record the time in your own process?

Identify the process, step, case and role carrying out the work.
Record when active work starts and stops, with interruptions separated where possible.
Record waiting time and what the next step was waiting for, apart from active work.
Link the observation to an appropriate trace, such as an email time or a tool event.
Record exceptions, repeated work and limits in the evidence, rather than treating a guess as a measurement.

Observe a representative cycle before changing the process. A week or two can be a practical starting point, not a universal minimum or proof that the sample is complete. Monthly work, seasonal peaks or rare exceptions may need a different window. Write down which period you actually observed.

Tool timestamps help establish an event sequence. They do not necessarily show active effort between those events. Do not turn a weekend waiting for approval into labour hours merely by subtracting two dates. Where observations and traces disagree, investigate and state the remaining uncertainty.

Why keep the results by step?

Totals by step show where to investigate a change. Keep counts of cases alongside time per case, so a frequent short task can be compared with an occasional long one. Separate necessary checks, rework and waiting before labelling the whole total as waste.

When putting a cost beside active hours, use an agreed labour-cost assumption for the relevant role and state it. An illustrative calculation is recorded active hours multiplied by that hourly cost. Time released is not automatically a cash saving; a proposal should explain how that capacity would be used and what the change would cost.

Eurostat’s 2025 estimates were EUR 12.0 per hour for Bulgaria and EUR 34.9 for the EU, covering enterprises with 10 or more employees in the included sectors. These are scoped averages, not your business’s hourly cost.

Questions

Can an industry average replace measuring our process?

It can suggest a question, but it does not identify the step, cause or recoverable time in your own process. Use observations and traceable cases for the decision, and keep any comparison clearly separate from the baseline.

Is a single day enough?

That depends on the cycle and variation you need to observe. Record the period and its limits. An unusually busy or quiet day may miss ordinary work, while a week can still miss a monthly task. Choose the window for the process, not for a fixed rule.

How do we turn hours into a financial estimate?

Use the employer’s agreed cost for the roles involved, with the components and assumptions stated, rather than substituting take-home pay or a national average. Keep active work, waiting and hypothetical recovered capacity separate. The estimate is not a measured return on investment.

Sources

Measure your own hours before importing an average.

An Expert Review maps the processes in the agreed scope end to end and records the time by step, separating active work from waiting and checking what the person says against the traces left in the tools.

Ask about an Expert Review

or write to contact@ergostrat.com