Your employees’ time management and efficiency impact productivity. The more focused your employees remain, the more they can accomplish.
How your employees control their time affects their creativity, work quality, and stress levels. Completing tasks before the deadlines supports work-life balance and minimizes burnout.
As a result, you should encourage your employees to boost their time management and efficiency. These methods can help.
Choose among these eight tips to boost employee time management and efficiency.
1. Stay Organized
Encourage your employees to stay organized so they can find what they need when they need it. Maintaining organized work areas lowers stress and anxiety for better mental health.
Your employees can stay organized by:
- Keeping their desks free of nonessential items.
- Keeping daily tools within reach.
- Naming computer files for easy access and sharing.
2. Prioritize Tasks
Help your employees prioritize their tasks. For instance, they can use an Eisenhower Matrix to determine the importance and urgency of each task and schedule accordingly:
- Tasks with deadlines should be done immediately.
- Important tasks with no set deadlines should be scheduled for later.
- Tasks that are not critical to company goals should be deleted.
3. Group Similar Tasks
Schedule similar tasks according to objective or function. For instance, generate and distribute reports from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. and respond to emails from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.
4. Create a Daily Schedule
Encourage your employees to schedule time blocks for specific tasks:
- Ensure the most important tasks are accomplished first.
- Set realistic timelines.
- Allow additional time for unexpected interruptions.
- Include 10- to 15-minute breaks between tasks.
- Follow the schedule as planned.
- Cross off each finished task.
- Move any unfinished task to the next day.
5. Complete One Task at a Time
Remind your employees to focus on and finish one task at a time. Then, they can move on to the next scheduled task.
The brain is not designed to move between tasks quickly. It takes time to refocus on a new task. Therefore, multitasking takes more time and typically leads to low-quality work.
6. Implement Time Tracking
Ask your employees to keep track of the time they spend on activities each day. For instance, your employees might want to use a time-tracking tool such as RescueTime to determine how much time is spent being productive and how much time is spent on non-work activities such as online shopping. Then, your employees can uncover the areas and habits that block them from reaching their goals and make changes to improve efficiency.
7. Use Time Management Tools
Suggest your employees use time management tools to boost productivity and efficiency. Examples include:
- Slack for centralized team communications organized by channel
- Dropbox or OneDrive for file storage, sharing, and backup.
- Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar for scheduling, alerts, and reminders.
8. Maintain Boundaries
Remind your employees to say “no” when needed. There are a limited number of hours in the day, and your employees likely are at capacity with their workloads. Although helping out colleagues and coworkers is encouraged, your employees should maintain a work-life balance to avoid burnout.
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