The Hidden Cost of Disorganisation: How Poor Tool Management Affects Productivity
How many times have we seen the classic movie scene where the hero needs a particular tool to prevent a potentially world-ending catastrophe, only to be stymied by the essential tool being misplaced or missing? Typically, the hero roots through mountains of disorganized material as a clock ticks down to the inevitable explosion, alien invasion, toxic gas release, or whatever disaster is in store. At the very last minute, the hero finds the misplaced tool, shuts down the machine, threatens destruction, and saves the world. But all of that stress and suspense could have been prevented with a little bit of organization.
Your business may not literally stare down the end of the world each workday, but disorganized tools can create problems for your business and do a great deal of damage to your company’s productivity. In this article, we’ll take a look at the ways that disorganization is quietly costing you money and how you can use proper tool management to increase productivity.
Disorganization Wastes Time
One of the most obvious facts about productivity is that it requires us to actually be focused on the task to be done. Any time we are not focused on that task, then we are not maximizing our productivity. This extends to our tools as well. When tools are not properly organized, workers waste a great deal of time looking for the tools, time that they could be spending on productive tasks. While it might seem to have only a minimal impact if a worker spends a couple of minutes per day hunting for lost tools when you multiply that out across the number of workdays in the year and the number of employees in your business, you can quickly see that the amount of wasted time can add up to whole weeks of work lost to disorganization.
Disorganization leads directly to less time spent on the actual task at hand and, thus, to delays in your project timelines.
Disorganization Increases Employee Stress and Frustration
Productive employees tend to be employees who are satisfied with their jobs and have manageable levels of stress. When employees become more stressed, their productivity drops, and they become more frustrated with their work. When tools are disorganized, employees become frustrated. Struggling to find the right tools for their jobs can be extremely stressful, and devoting mental resources to managing disorganization can burden workers by contributing to their cognitive load. This, in turn, can slow down the workers’ ability to make good decisions and to complete tasks. It can take their focus off the job at hand. At extreme levels, disorganized tools can contribute to employee burnout, lower morale, and reduced motivation, all of which reduce productivity.
Disorganization Can Negatively Impact Teamwork
Teamwork requires everyone to be on the same page and work together toward the same ends. When tools are disorganized, members of the same team can’t work together effectively to work productively. For example, if one member of a team doesn’t return a tool to the right spot in the toolbox organizer, then other members of the team won’t be able to find the tool and will have to stop and ask where it went, leading to wasted time and potential breakdowns in communication, particularly if team members become frustrated with one another over lost or misplaced tools.
Disorganization Can Lead to More Errors and Mistakes
When the right tool isn’t readily at hand, workers are more likely to try to make do with a tool that may not be the best for the task at hand.
In that case, this can lead to the potential for errors and mistakes to multiply. Using the wrong tool makes it more likely that you will do something incorrectly, and tasks may take longer than expected to complete. Teams, especially, may find that without the right tools readily at hand, they need to do more manual work to complete tasks, leading to slower work and possibly even redundancy.
Disorganization Can Lead to a Loss of Competitive Advantage
The bottom line is that all of these small impacts that disorganized tools create add up to a big competitive disadvantage. For instance, too many slowdowns caused by disorganization can result in delays in project delivery or slower adaptation to market conditions. In industries where agility is key to staying competitive, this can be a major problem. Your competitors are working ruthlessly to create efficiencies, so any delays that turn into inefficiencies can mean losing out to competitors.
