5 Tips to improve your employees’ time management

It’s important to have control over your company’s finances. Including labour costs – or employees’ time management.

Tech-savvy businesses use cloud-based time and attendance software (such as uAttend) to keep track of employee attendance and hours.

By automating the tracking of employee time, you don’t waste time on non-essential work. And you also have accurate data when paying out wages or analysing payroll issues.

But even without the benefit of new technology, there are some simple tricks that can help you and your employees get more done in less time.

Here are our five simple steps to improving your employees’ time management.

Staff training 

Make effective time management a routine part of your staff training or induction. Clearly explain the processes you expect employees to follow so that they know what is expected of them.

You can motivate your employees by letting them know that working in the most effective way makes a difference to their performance and therefore their promotion and earnings potential.

Here’s a great example of effective time management methods:

Prioritisation

In order to prioritise your employees need to truly understand what is important for your business.

Keep them in the loop with business updates, quarterly KPIs and how they should be helping reach them.

If you spend less time micromanaging where they are most productive, and more time teaching them how to make the decision themselves, the outcome will be better for all.

Simple ways to do this: When they start their day, do they know what they should be doing that day? Do they know what their goals and deadlines are?

Employers who are clear about these aspects will encourage a culture where staff can make the best use of their time.

Delegation

While businesses want to ensure that they are getting the most from their staff, giving them the power to delegate work where appropriate is vital.

At first glance, it may seem as though multitasking is a virtue rather than a vice – how else are you supposed to get so much done in a day?

However, research has found that productivity falls off sharply when people try to perform more than one task at once (thereby multitasking).

Researchers call it cognitive overload, and it typically leads people to make many mistakes and take longer on their work.

By expecting employees to be the owner of too many tasks in one day, you can overload them and actually slow down productivity.

Instead, enable delegation among employees so jobs are more likely finished.
Distributing tasks to others in their team can also even bring fresh insight and new approaches.

Procrastination 

We’ve all been there occasionally, but serial procrastinators really need help.

Indecisive staff or those who take time starting a task are not doing a business any favours.

Psychologists say that procrastination can be the result of a fear of failure or of being too much of a perfectionist.

Gossipy chats, internet-browsing and general procrastination can prove a real temptation for some. But others may simply lack the skills to organise themselves to make the best use of their time.

Here line managers need to change behaviour patterns by encouraging the drawing up of ‘to do’ lists. Break projects down with goals and deadlines clearly stated.

It is important to keep communicating with these employees and give them positive feedback where possible.

Automation 

Technology is here to help. Not hinder. So why not automate tasks that can help managers get on with managing?

It’s not about taking away workers jobs but helping with time-consuming chores.

For example, a T&A system will allow managers to monitor how much time each employee spends in departments and allow administrators to generate reports detailing how much labour costs for each department.

In addition, it helps HR departments determine which of their workers are putting in longer hours. So they can better compensate those who are deserving of higher pay grades or bonuses.

Conclusion:

Ultimately employers need to judge whether the best use is being made of one of their most valuable and expensive resources – their staff. A smart and simple time and attendance system is an effective way of knowing the hours being worked and when projects are started and finished.

Business tools like uAttend help employers spot any problems and any potential performance issues.

It’s a great starting point to make sure your business is meeting employees’ time management goals.

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