What are the Three Costs of Workplace Waste? (TMS Insights)

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Last Updated on December 5, 2024 by Bill Truby

Workplace waste isn’t just about money—it’s about time, energy, and missed opportunities. Discover the hidden costs of inefficiency and how leaders can tackle waste to boost productivity and ease team dynamics. Ready to make life easier?

*This video is a full video training of one of the tools in the Truby Management System. It’s a sample of the quality, commonsense teaching, and non-time-consuming way Truby Achievements trains its members. The Truby Management System (TMS) is a training program developed by Truby Achievements, Inc. To explore the full curriculum and enhance your leadership skills, visit https://TrubyAchievements.com

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Video Transcript

When you waste anything, it costs you three times.

Waste time, waste energy, waste money—anything, any resource that you waste literally costs you three times, and I’m gonna show you how that works.

It is so important to avoid waste. It’s so important to be efficient and productive. Other tutorials have taught you how to do that. This one teaches you what happens when you’re not efficient, when you waste.

I’m gonna give you an illustration as to how this works to teach you the concept.

Let’s say you’re a contractor, and you ask one of your men to paint a room. And let’s say it costs you a hundred dollars for that to happen. It’s done, but he paints the wrong room.

Now what do you have to do?

You need to talk to him, maybe discipline, clarify what’s going on, get more paint, and then he has to paint the right room.

Now, you’ve paid a hundred dollars for the wrong room to be painted. You’ve paid another hundred dollars for the right room to be painted. But I said it costs you three times.

What’s the third cost?

In economic terms, it’s called an opportunity cost. You lost the opportunity to use the second hundred dollars towards another room or something else that you’d want to spend that money on.

So it’s an opportunity cost.

Now notice something. I’m talking about just the wages of this person to paint the wrong room, the right room, and the lost opportunity to use that money elsewhere.

There are so many other costs associated with it.

There’s the time and energy to talk about what went right, what went wrong. There’s the paint itself. There’s all kinds of other peripheral costs.

So when I say it costs you three times, it costs you three times in everything that’s associated with the waste.

It’s so important to be clear in your communication, in your delegation. It’s so important for people to be accountable.

All of these things in the Truby Management System that provide you with tools for accountability and efficiency and productivity. All of those things help you avoid waste, and that makes life so much easier.

Just think about the energy it takes to deal with people issues. We have had so many leaders say that when they put all of the tools in place, they save so much time.

Many have said that their time in dealing with people issues has gone from 90% down to 40%, 80% down to 20% because they’re not wasting anymore.

You waste 10 minutes of time, you’re wasting 30 minutes of time.

This is the important point of this tutorial.

The cost of waste isn’t the apparent cost of the simple thing you’re looking at, be it money or time or energy or resources. It’s an amplified cost of costing you three times.

Be a good leader. Look for waste, fix it. Avoid waste in all aspects of your operation, your team dynamics, your communication, and your resources, and life will get a lot easier for you.

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