It’s 7:00am and your alarm goes off. What do you do first? Brush your teeth? Take a shower? Eat breakfast? Believe it or not, the first thing half of the population in the US does is check their work email, according to a survey by Good Technology. Not surprisingly, 80% of these Americans work “after hours,” equating to an entire extra day of work per week.

Now, some may look at these statistics and think “Wow, what a great work ethic!” Others may complain they are being overworked. Whether you’re putting in extra man hours because you’re enthusiastic about your job or being hounded by your boss, one thing is certain: a lot of your time “working” is being wasted with inefficient communication.

The average employee wastes 25% of their workweek due to poor communication and collaboration processes, according to a recent study from McKinsey Global Institute. That’s a whopping 11 hours of your week wasted fumbling through emails, playing phone tag, and sitting through endless meetings. But according to the study, all of this time wasted can be time saved by implementing an enterprise social network. Enterprise social networking improves inefficient business processes by reducing email clutter, speeding up the decision making process, streamlining communications, finding expertise faster and giving employees the opportunity to work from anywhere on their mobile device.

Truth is, even if you’re fulfilling all the expectations of a full-time job, without an enterprise social network, you’re only producing about 75% of what you should be. Until communications and business processes are streamlined in your organization, it’s almost impossible to work less than 50 hours a week. So where is the line drawn? How can your business maximize your employees potential, without having them work a 7-day week? Let’s look at a quick example of how Cordelta, a professional services firm, used tibbr, enterprise social networking, to shorten their workflow and get more done in a shorter amount of time.

After implementing tibbr, Cordelta calculated a 30% improvement in communication overall, with employees spending less time in email, meetings and searching for information. Plus, with employees discovering the information they need via tibbr’s collaborative subjects, Cordelta’s IT team is spending less time managing portals and maintaing email groups.

Imagine, 48 hours of “work” completed in just 40 hours. There’s no need to fantasize about it, enterprise social networking is very real and leads the way to the bright future of a more efficient, fully productive workforce. As Ram Menon, President of Social Computing at TIBCO states, with a private social network, “work simply gets done faster” so you have extra time for other things whether it be work or play. What would you do with your extra hours? Let us know in the comments below.

To read further on how enterprise social networking is transforming businesses, download the full report.