British businesses are wasting more than £13 billion a year in lost productivity as middle managers spend weeks dealing with avoidable, low-value work, according to new research by YouGov. The findings - published in the fifth annual Feedback from the Field report by workplace operations platform SafetyCulture - reveal that middle managers lose an average of 7.3 weeks a year to unnecessary or repetitive tasks, including unproductive meetings, email overload, and correcting others' mistakes. The cost of that inefficiency is staggering: when managers' wages are combined with the scale of the UK's frontline workforce, the total wasted time amounts to £13.2 billion annually, the report estimates.
I intentionally stayed in the middle management bracket, where I was paid well and typically worked 40 to 45 hours most weeks. This meant I had enough time to build a real-estate side business.