I have a confession, in my previous professional life as an operator, I burn through my fair share of front lobby receptionist by assigning them extra administrative work which thought was very doable at the time. After reading some of these studies, I realize my expectations were not realistic and why we failed to maintain a quality front receptionist. The article shares how we can use technology like the MyLobby Visitor Management to maintain office productivity. I believed giving our front lobby reception staff additional administrative support work made a lot of sense at the time when they were not busy with answering phones or processing for the visitor registration and contacting their hosts. Although the lack of output they demonstrated was often disappointing now I understand why. I stumbled upon a study from the University of California; they discover in their observations an average day at an office workplace employee are interrupted or changing your tasks, on average, every three minutes and five seconds. Also, to get back on task can take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to resume where they left off. Jonathan Spira, who authored the book “Overload! He examines How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization,” estimates that interruptions and information overload devour up 28 billion wasted hours a year, at a loss of almost $1 trillion to the U.S. economy. Another work-flow consultant Edward G. Brown concluded:
- 40 and 60 percent of works time was utterly wasted.
- Work interruptions can consume nearly 238 minutes per day.
- Additional time for restarting accounts for the loss of another 84 minutes
- momentum loss, do-overs and lead to more mistakes. Stress and fatigue consume another 50 minutes
That leads to inadequacies totally to 322 minutes equal to 5.36 hours per day. Here is the math and actual cost of interruptions for a Front lobby receptionist: The average pay rate in the United States is 17-19 per hour according to salary.com The average is 17.50 per hour. Earlier we learned a loss productivity averages 5.36 hours, x 17.50 = $93.80 per day or $1876 per week. Per year this totals to be $22,000 US per year. Ouch, that hurts 🙁
The takeaway from the studies, is we need to reconsider assigning additional administrative work to front-line staff such as a front lobby receptionist who has the responsibility of greeting visitors or managing visitor registration along with either routinely or occasionally answering phone calls. An alternative solution, we use technology to mitigate some of these responsibilities. For years corporations and using automated telephone attendants to answer the phones. Today corporations I have a new technology such as MyLobby visitor Management System which automates the visitor reception process with the digital display tablet with options to take a picture of the visitor and print the visitor’s badge. The argument for choosing the latter is, with a healthy job market is getting more difficult to find talent in a tight job market. Giving you a front-line staff tool that automates the visitor management and registration will keep them on task with fewer interruptions and yield great productivity.