The What, When, Why & How Of A Time And Motion Study

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We examine how modern time and motion studies expose hidden waste, translate seconds into savings, and protect sustainable pace. From Taylor and the Gilbreths to sensors and benchmarks, we map the methods, the maths, and the immediate actions that cut costs without cutting quality

• Spotting inefficiency in everyday work
• Time versus motion as separate measurements
• Resource planning using standard times and allowances
• Micro savings through layout and sequence changes
• Example maths for staffing and throughput
• Study types: activity, efficiency, role, predetermined
• History of Taylor and the Gilbreths
• Quantifying financial waste from poor scheduling
• Modern tech: video, sensors, software analysis
• Benchmarking click and collect performance
• Practical ergonomic and staffing changes
• Continuous improvement as the new one best way

Not only will our approach to a Time and Motion Study plot out exactly where you stand versus where you could be, but our analysts will provide practical steps on how to help you get there, saving you time, effort  and, ultimately, money

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More information on Time and Motion Studies can be found in our whitepaper – our experts’ views into how modern techniques are bringing about new productivity insights. Download here >>

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Chapters

• 0:14 Spotting Hidden Inefficiency
• 0:34 What Time And Motion Really Measure
• 2:47 From Data To Staffing Decisions
• 4:14 Sustainable Pace And Allowances
• 5:01 Targeting High-Impact Micro Savings
• 6:50 Study Types From Macro To Micro
• 10:01 Origins: Taylor And The Gilbreths
• 13:00 The Cost Of Mismatch In Scheduling

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Welcome to the Deep Dive. If you've ever walked into a workplace, maybe a retail store, or even an office, and you've seen people taking just slightly different routes to do the exact same task.

SPEAKER_01: 0:20

Or just waiting around.

SPEAKER_00: 0:21

Exactly. Or waiting around for something to happen. What you're looking at is inefficiency. It's this sort of hidden waste that just eats away at productivity. So today we are taking a deep dive into a classic, but, well, a fundamentally revolutionized business technique. It's known as the time and motion study.

SPEAKER_01: 0:39

Aaron Powell And our mission here is really to understand how this idea, which is, you know, a century old, has been modernized to unlock just massive productivity gains in the economy today.

SPEAKER_00: 0:52

Aaron Powell It seems so critical because we're moving so far beyond that old image, right? The person with a clipboard and a stopwatch.

SPEAKER_01: 0:58

Aaron Powell Oh, absolutely. At its core, this study, it's like a forensic examination of work. It separates the whole process into two measurable streams. You have the time side, which identifies exactly how long a task takes, down to the tenth of a second, and then you have the motion side, which meticulously tracks all the physical activity involved in actually doing that task.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17

So it's not really about judging the employee, then, it's about dissecting the task itself.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21

Precisely.

SPEAKER_00: 1:22

But I have to ask, why is that unbiased outside perspective so necessary? I mean, if I'm making coffee every single day, don't I know the fastest way to frock the milk?

SPEAKER_01: 1:33

Well, you know a way, maybe even the fastest way for you. But the whole goal of an outsider is to challenge that established habit.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41

The thing you do on autopilot.

SPEAKER_01: 1:42

Exactly. When you bring in a fresh, quantitative eye, you just eliminate all the bias that's built up from months or even years of routine. That objective evaluation finds all this extra movement, unnecessary walking things, the person doing the work just doesn't even see anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59

Aaron Powell And the result isn't just theory, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01

Aaron Powell No, not at all. It's practical improvements. Right. It means less physical movement for the employee. And, you know, critically, it makes the task uniformly quicker across the entire organization.

SPEAKER_00: 2:12

I like that. It's about optimizing the process, not criticizing the person. And the material we're looking at today, it really hones in on how these modern techniques give us specialized data that unlocks those gains.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24

Aaron Powell And understanding how to apply this is the key. That's what delivers the immediate savings, which I mean that's what we're drilling down into right now.

SPEAKER_00: 2:32

Aaron Powell So let's get into that practical application. Once a business goes through this assessment, what are the primary outcomes? How does this data actually translate into measurable action?

SPEAKER_01: 2:43

Okay. So we generally see the outcomes used in two killer ways. First up, and this is just crucial for budgeting in HR, is resource planning.

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

Resource planning.

SPEAKER_01: 2:52

This is where you perfectly match the actual workload requirements to your staffing levels. It just takes all the guesswork out of deployment.

SPEAKER_00: 2:58

Okay, give us a quantitative example. How does the math actually work in a store?

SPEAKER_01: 3:03

Sure. Imagine a service counter. A study finds that serving one customer from the greeting all the way to finishing the transaction takes exactly 60 seconds.

SPEAKER_00: 3:12

One minute. Simple enough.

SPEAKER_01: 3:14

Right. But if your store is a high-volume hub that gets, say, 120 transactions every hour, well, you can't just rely on one person. That means you need 120 deployed minutes of labor every single hour.

SPEAKER_00: 3:26

So you need two people.

SPEAKER_01: 3:27

You need two full-time colleagues right there, just to manage the throughput. And if the study shows it takes 90 seconds per transaction, suddenly you need three colleagues. It's hard data guiding staffing.

SPEAKER_00: 3:38

That's so powerful, it just quantifies the labor need instantly. But hang on, if we staff perfectly to that maximum speed, doesn't that remove any buffer, you know, for glitches or just people getting tired? Does the modern study factor in human sustainability?

SPEAKER_01: 3:52

That is a critical question. And that's where this whole analysis moves beyond uh old school tailorism. Modern studies absolutely factor in allowances. Aaron Powell Allowances for what? Things like personal needs, recovery from fatigue, unavoidable delays. The goal isn't a continuous maximum pace, it's a continuous optimized pace, one that's sustainable.

SPEAKER_00: 4:12

Okay, understood. So resource planning is the first big application. What's the second main use for this data?

SPEAKER_01: 4:17

Aaron Powell The second is about focusing improvement efforts, where they'll give you the biggest return. Think about it like compounding interest, but for time.

SPEAKER_00: 4:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 4:26

You know, eliminating some rare 10-minute task you do once a quarter might feel good. But the real financial leverage comes from shaving just two or three seconds off a process that's done fifty times a day, every single day.

SPEAKER_00: 4:40

Those micro savings.

SPEAKER_01: 4:41

Those micro savings compound so fast into hours saved every week.

SPEAKER_00: 4:45

Can we make that concrete with the coffee shop example?

SPEAKER_01: 4:48

Absolutely. Let's think about making a latte. The analysis might break it down into what, maybe seven distinct micro tasks?

SPEAKER_00: 4:54

Okay, so taking the order and payment, step one.

SPEAKER_01: 4:57

Right. Getting the cup, the lid, the sleeve, step two. Running the espresso shot is three, frothing the milk, four, assembly five, handing it over six.

SPEAKER_00: 5:09

And where do those tiny savings hide in all of that?

SPEAKER_01: 5:12

They hide in the layout. Is the cup dispenser three feet away from the espresso machine or is it six feet away? Does the barista have to turn their back on the customer to use the register?

SPEAKER_00: 5:20

That tiny rotation of the body?

SPEAKER_01: 5:22

Yes. If the frothing station is poorly laid out, maybe they spend two extra seconds reaching for a cloth. Seconds that, repeated hundreds of times a day, turn into hours of wasted motion and delayed service.

SPEAKER_00: 5:35

It really shows how specialized this feel has become. I mean, we're zooming in so close, you're looking at milliseconds. I understand the analysis usually starts by classifying the scope of the problem first, right?

SPEAKER_01: 5:46

Aaron Powell Exactly. The approach is versatile. You have the activity study, which is that fundamental how long does this take question.

SPEAKER_00: 5:53

Aaron Powell Then the broader one.

SPEAKER_01: 5:54

Aaron Powell That's the efficiency study. A macro view looking at how time is spent by an entire team over, say, a whole week.

SPEAKER_00: 6:03

Aaron Powell And then there are two highly specialized types, I believe.

SPEAKER_01: 6:05

Aaron Powell Yes. The role study, which quantifies how specific roles, say a manager versus an associate, spend their time. It's invaluable for structuring your management.

SPEAKER_00: 6:15

Aaron Powell And the most granular one?

SPEAKER_01: 6:17

That's a predetermined study. It's highly technical. It breaks a task down not just into skeps, but into individual elemental movements. So not pick up a pen, but reaching, grasping, and positioning. Analysts can literally calculate the optimal combination of movements to eliminate strain. It's how experts design a perfect workstation before a single brick is even laid.

SPEAKER_00: 6:37

That history is fascinating. Let's transition to the origin story. This whole field feels so deeply rooted in the industrial age. When did this all start and why as two separate things, time and motion?

SPEAKER_01: 6:50

Well, the field actually began with two really influential but distinct movements that eventually emerged. The time studies side that originated in the U.S. in the 1880s with Frederick W. Taylor.

SPEAKER_00: 7:01

Taylor, the famous scientific management guy, what was really driving him?

SPEAKER_01: 7:05

Taylor was obsessed with productivity. He coined the term soldiering, the idea that workers were intentionally working slowly. His goal was to replace that guesswork with precise science. His time studies were all about finding a standard time for a task, mostly to set fairway trades.

SPEAKER_00: 7:21

Right. He was famous for maximizing physical output. I remember the story about him studying men shoveling pig iron.

SPEAKER_01: 7:26

That's the classic example. He observed workers at Bethlehem Steel shoveling all sorts of materials, heavy iron ore, light coal dust, using the same shovel.

SPEAKER_00: 7:35

Which makes no sense.

SPEAKER_01: 7:36

Right. He timed them and realized the load was inconsistent, which led to fatigue. So by experimenting, he figured out the optimal load for a man to shovel all day was about 21 pounds.

SPEAKER_00: 7:47

21 pounds, no matter the material.

SPEAKER_01: 7:50

Exactly. So he introduced custom shovels of different sizes. Whether the material was light or heavy, the worker was always lifting that optimal 21 pound load. Productivity shot up, and worker strain went down. All based on timing.

SPEAKER_00: 8:03

So Taylor was all about speed and time. What about the motion half? The efficiency of movement.

SPEAKER_01: 8:08

That's where we meet Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. They were pioneers in industrial psychology, and their focus was on improving the methods of work. They knew speed was useless if the method itself was clumsy or exhausting.

SPEAKER_00: 8:20

Their work in construction is famous, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01: 8:22

The bricklaying study is their hallmark. Before them, a bricklayer used maybe 18 separate motions to lay one brick. Bending, picking up the brick, getting mortar, tapping it.

SPEAKER_00: 8:32

All that wasted movement, what did they discover?

SPEAKER_01: 8:35

Using early motion picture cameras, they analyzed it frame by frame and managed to reduce those 18 motions down to just five.

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

Wow.

SPEAKER_01: 8:43

By standardizing the working height, pre-stacking bricks, things like that, they cut the labor effort by two-thirds and massively increased the rate of bricklaying. They were always striving for that one best way. So that's the key distinction. Tailor speed, the Gilbreths minimizing effort. When those two ideas finally merged, you got the powerful synthesis we see today, finding the fastest, most consistent, and lowest effort way to do any task.

SPEAKER_00: 9:10

Okay, so let's unpack the value here. Beyond just feeling efficient, why is this so essential for companies today? I mean, let's talk real money, because the research provides a very compelling financial scenario.

SPEAKER_01: 9:21

It is purely about finding money that is currently being lost. Let's use that retailer example from the source material. Imagine a store that schedules five colleagues for an eight-hour shift.

SPEAKER_00: 9:30

Okay, so that's 40 deployed hours they're paying for, standard scheduling. But after a comprehensive time and motion study, they discover something powerful. The actual tasks, customer service, stocking, everything, only required 33 hours of optimized labor. A seven-hour gap in a single shift. That's that's shocking.

SPEAKER_01: 9:50

Seven extra hours. Every single day that the business is paying for but aren't contributing to anything. If you annualize that, you're looking at over 2,500 wasted hours a year.

SPEAKER_00: 10:00

And in money terms.

SPEAKER_01: 10:01

Well, if the wage is, say, 10 pounds an hour, that single inefficiency is costing that business a whopping 25,000 pounds a year.

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

25,000 pounds. Just from a mismatch between scheduled heads and the actual workload? That's a clear, quantifiable loss.

SPEAKER_01: 10:15

And that is the primary driver. These studies provide the actionable info that lets businesses, as they say, discover opportunities. It's turning lost time directly into savings.

SPEAKER_00: 10:24

That brings us to the present day. We have this image of Taylor with his stopwatch producing piles of paper. It sounds so slow, so prone to error. How do modern methods leverage technology to move beyond that?

SPEAKER_01: 10:35

Well, the meticulous attention to detail is still there, but the execution is entirely digital now. Instead of a manual stopwatch, modern studies use sophisticated tech, often high-speed video capture and sensor-based tracking.

SPEAKER_00: 10:50

And how does that tech change the game?

SPEAKER_01: 10:52

It's about accuracy and scale. The software can analyze micropauses and unnecessary hand rotations that a human observer would completely miss. Productivity experts then apply their deep operational knowledge to that data.

SPEAKER_00: 11:05

So it's not just some generalist timing things, it's a specialist who really understands, say, a fast food environment.

SPEAKER_01: 11:12

Precisely. The expertise is layered right on top of the technology. And crucially, the outcome isn't just a data dump. The suggestions are practical and immediate.

SPEAKER_00: 11:21

Like what?

SPEAKER_01: 11:22

It could be simple ergonomic changes, like moving ingredients closer to a workstation, or it could be major changes, like adjusting staff numbers down during proven low demand periods.

SPEAKER_00: 11:31

I imagine having industry benchmarks must be an incredible differentiator here, knowing exactly where you stand and how much better you could be.

SPEAKER_01: 11:38

That benchmarking power is immense. Take, click, and collect, which is so critical now. The best in class retailers process those orders in under 30 seconds.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

30 seconds.

SPEAKER_01: 11:48

But studies show that many average retailers are taking three to four minutes.

SPEAKER_00: 11:52

Three minutes versus thirty seconds. A customer absolutely feels that difference.

SPEAKER_01: 11:56

And the efficient retailer gets there not through faster employees, but through an optimized process. The orders are pre-picked and stored right by the counter. The IT system is slick. The difference is design, and it's informed by data-backed insight. That's fascinating. It really underscores the ultimate promise here. Using real-world data to deliver thorough insight, not just an overload of information. The aim is to make a tangible difference.

SPEAKER_00: 12:22

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 12:23

The modern methodologies, they go way beyond just documenting what you already do. They plot where you stand versus where you could be, and most importantly, the analysts provide the practical steps to help you get there. You save time, effort, and you save significant money.

SPEAKER_00: 12:36

So for anyone listening who sees that kind of financial potential in their own organization, exploring these modern techniques seems like the obvious next step.

SPEAKER_01: 12:44

It is. And the deep reviews, the new productivity insights, and these methodologies we've been talking about are all readily available. If you're ready to actually apply these techniques, we really encourage you to access the white paper online. It gives a complete view of how these studies are being used right now. And finally, a thought for you to mull over as we conclude. If Taylor was searching for the one true standardized time, and the Gilbreths were searching for the one best way. Well, does the speed of modern technology and AI mean that the one best way is now constantly evolving? Hmm, a moving target.

SPEAKER_00: 13:20

Exactly. Does it require continuous, almost immediate reassessment? That's a dynamic challenge worth exploring. We recommend you head to the website to continue this deep dive and access those detailed insights on how to apply these powerful techniques.