While you might not be able to assign a dollar amount to it, time is a very valuable thing. Therefore, the ability to manage your time well is an advantageous skill. Time management is the key to success. Employees who have good time management skills are more efficient, better at making decisions, and are ultimately more successful. Likewise, poor time management skills can result in missed deadlines and dissatisfied clients. To help avoid these issues and improve performance, here are 5 time management techniques managers should share with their employees.
Plan and Set Goals
Managers should work with their employees to set daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Each goal should be broken down into smaller manageable tasks each with its own deadline. This gives employees a clear understanding of what their specific tasks are and how long they have to complete each of them. In addition, consider providing employees with task management tools such as online calendars or project management programs.
Prioritize
Help employees improve time management by learning how to prioritize their tasks. They should evaluate their responsibilities based on urgency and complete the tasks with the highest priority first. This requires effective communication between the manager and employee to ensure that their priorities are aligned.
Teach Them to Delegate
Delegating is a great way for managers to encourage their employees while developing their own mentoring and coaching skills. Likewise, employees should learn how to delegate to others as well. This allows them to divide the work load among their team members making the team as a whole more efficient. Managers need to explain each task and responsibility thoroughly and then allow employees to come up with an efficient method for completing the task.
Avoid Distractions
There is no doubt that interruptions and distractions are going to occur, but the goal is to minimize them. Whenever possible, managers should schedule important tasks for parts of the day that are less distracting. For example, an employee is much more likely to work efficiently first thing in the morning as opposed to 15 minutes before lunch or right at the end of the day. Similarly, employees should refrain from engaging in too much distracting behavior such as conversations, personal phone calls, or social media. Managers should remind employees that it is important to keep these distractions to a minimum.
Organize
There is nothing that leads to wasted time quite like disorganization. Think of how many minutes are lost when employees are searching for a missing file, document, or phone number. Managers can help employees improve their time management by emphasizing the importance of an organized work space. They can even provide online tools to help with organization in order to maximize efficiency.