Many books and articles have been devoted to the monitoring of the staff. No less is written about time management and its necessity. But does a manager show to the staff the value of time, so that they will appreciate it?
These 7 steps are worth following to improve employees’ productivity and understanding of the value of time:
Use a time tracker to keeping records of your time
Before starting to save time, start tracking it. To do this in everyday life we need to consciously approach each activity, or personal contact. Meeting a colleague in the hallway and engaging in a conversation you need to understand the purpose of it. In professional activities automated time tracker will be a very helpful tool for such purposes.
Assign the price of your time
Make it simple: you need to divide the monthly income by the amount of working hours, this will be the price of an hour of your work. This value is necessary to keep in mind every time something or someone tries to distract you from duties. It works better than many other ways to control employee’s productivity as it is in the personal interests of the affected person.
Analyze your free time
It is easier to discipline oneself at work, especially if the time tracker does not allow the staff to be badly distracted, but free hours and minutes usually fly unnoticed. Time for family and friends constantly lacking, but even a few hours a month can be made unforgettable, because emotions, according to psychologists, fasten relationships, not an amount of time spent together.
Always start a conversation with the main thesis
People have many different reasons to make their speech complicated, confusing, and counterintuitive. But in conversations, particularly on business, this should still be avoided. To be direct and brief in conversation, compose your speech so that it starts with the main thesis. Talking straight about what you need does not mean to be rude, on the contrary, it shows your respect for the interlocutor and his time. Your own time will not be spent on senseless conversations with colleagues, and the employee monitoring software will show an improvement of your effectiveness.
Make sure your interlocutor understands you
The easiest way to do this is to ask. To avoid wasting time on figuring out later who misunderstood what and why it is better to find out the problem immediately when giving a task. A manager is advised to take time to clearly state the problem to be solved: specify the problem, indicate the end result and the date, optionally describe the steps to achieve the result. After that a manager needs to ask if everything is clear. Giving a task to a new employee, a manager can ask him to retell the errand, which in most cases is not required from an experienced employee. This will help to reduce errors and inaccuracies later when performing the task.
Do not exclude personal communication at work
Some productive people have a tendency to avoid any personal conversations during working hours. This can be a barrier to career advancement. People like those whom they understand, with whom they have the same tastes and views. Excessive zeal in exclusion of any non-business conversations will not benefit an employee, even if he will be the most diligent and productive. Yes, the time tracker will show that the employee is very effective as a specialist, but personal conversations help you find out what kind of a person his is in general.
Learn to postpone a distracting conversation
Saving time when interacting with other people can be done by asking them to postpone a conversation. For this purpose it is necessary to say that the topic of conversation is very interesting for you and you’d like to discuss it some other time, as you are now busy. At an appropriate time it is sufficient to remind about your conversation and listen to the story. Your communication and efficiency will not suffer.