August 2018
How to Turn Your Team into Time-Saving Experts
Time is money. No, really: your team’s time costs actual money, so it makes sense to keep an eye on how they’re spending their time, and whether they’re working efficiently towards the same goals as the business.
But how do you make this happen? How can you make sure all your employees are on the same page and making every second count? By making them into time-saving experts, of course!
It won’t necessarily be easy, but with a little guidance and advice, your team can become masters of their time, boosting the business’ bottom line and ensuring productivity across the organisation.
To help, the Lunar Team have taken a (very quick) break from building bespoke CRM solutions for our clients to offer up some ideas on mastering employee time.
1. Delegate What They Don’t Need to Do
Occasionally, a task comes along that falls outside of an employee’s remit. Unfortunately, they aren’t always aware of the benefits of delegating such a task to someone else within the team for whom the task is better suited.
Having a conversation with your team around delegating will ease the pressure felt when something lands on their desk that they will struggle with, and will build a sense of community and comradeship as they work together to move the business forward.
But it’s not just work-related tasks that can drain employee time: things like cleaning the office can eat into minutes and hours over time, so sometimes you’ll have to consider the inevitable, like hiring a new member of the team and outsourcing office cleaning.
2. Avoid the Meeting Trap
Ah the meeting – a time-honoured tradition among the workplace masses. Although the occasional meeting (or daily ‘sprint’ of the Agile Methodology) can yield important results and keep the team on the same page, frequent meetings for the sake of holding a meeting can quickly swallow up time.
To counter this, ensure that meetings are only held when absolutely necessary. You can also place a time limit on meetings – including those with clients – and keep each meeting to a basic outline e.g. purpose of meeting, main body/challenges, discussion, conclusion to keep matters focused.
3. Manage Workflows
Managing time means managing employee workflows – which can sometimes seem like a daunting prospect. Thankfully, there are many tools available (such as a bespoke CRM) that will help managers to keep an eye on their team’s performance.
By using a bespoke CRM solution with workflow management features, you can stay in control of how your team spend their day, identifying issues where tasks are taking longer than anticipated.
This presents you with an opportunity to engage with employees around how they could improve, and make necessary changes to processes and procedures to help them stay productive and efficient.
4. Beware the Email Avalanche
Often, we get trapped in the cycle of the never-ending inbox, which seems to fill when we’re not looking. Employees can also become bogged down in reading and replying to emails internally, where a messaging system or bespoke CRM tool could instead suffice.
Help your employees to understand how to prioritise emails which require immediate action, use different methods of communication and, when needed, simply phone a customer to cut down on the time they spend in their inbox.
5. Minimise Distractions
Let’s be honest: the workplace of the 21st century has become a little cluttered with distractions. Aside from social media tempting employees away from work, we’ve collectively begun to subconsciously distract employees with office gimmicks, like ping pong tables and video games.
Whilst these are all great ideas for attracting fresh blood and helping employees to de-stress, their usage must come with the caveat that work is being done on time and to the proper standard.
As for social media, nobody wants to be the villain who gets the IT department to block Facebook, but if it’s the only way…
Saving Time Like an Expert
Ultimately, your employees have control over how well they manage their time – and how productive they are as a result. Cracking down too hard is likely to backfire and create a sour atmosphere, but recommending the above as a means of arming them with the tools to do their job efficiently is a good first step towards making a saving on every minute your employees use.
After all, time may be money, but their loyalty is priceless – something to remember throughout their evolution into time-saving experts.
Need an extra hand making the most of your employees’ time? Our bespoke CRM solution comes with all the workflow management tools you need to keep track of time, guiding your team in the right direction. To find out more, get in touch for a free demo.