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5 Time Management Secrets to Teach Your Employees

Time. We all wish we had more of it. Yet no matter how hard we try to conserve it, it seems to slip away from us in drips and drabs.

This is especially concerning if you’re in charge of a team of people responsible for ensuring your business runs smoothly and efficiently. If you can help every team member become more effective, think how much time you’ll save overall! Here are five time management secrets to teach today.

  1. Shorten Those To-Do Lists

One of the biggest time sucks is the endless to-do list. Filled with small and often nonessential items, to-do lists are only useful if they serve the purpose of helping people be more productive. Teach team members easy way to shorten to-do lists, like getting rid of all items they’ll do no matter what. Think “check email” or “get lunch.” Scratch easy tasks that don’t need to happen right away; they often become tempting due to their simplicity, and end up taking precedence over harder but more crucial chores.

Belle Cooper recommends moving tasks that depend on other people somewhere else (to a follow-up list, for instance, or a shared project) so that you don’t have to feel the nagging pressure of tasks you can’t complete on your own. Teach your employees how to distinguish between tasks they can and should do right away, and those that should be filed somewhere else or ditched altogether.

  1. Take Time to Be Creative

Creativity is crucial. It makes people feel happier, more productive and more in charge of their own work lives. It’s an amazing way to give your workers a little freedom, boosting their brainpower and making them more efficient when they return to regular tasks. Of course, creativity must still fall within the scope of the job, but giving workers time to explore, read, create or invent can immeasurably improve attitude, moral and time effectiveness.

  1. Create a System for Email

Ah, email. To reduce mental space and inbox space wasted by email, teach employees to deal with it right away. “Inbox Zero” should always be the goal, so read, reply or file instantly to reduce inbox clutter and improve efficiency.

  1. Handle a Task Once, and Once Only

The “One-Touch Rule” can significantly limit the amount of time employees spend waffling between tasks and feeling mentally burdened by chores that seem to haunt them forever. We all know that feeling of picking up and putting a task down so many times that it becomes a huge monkey on our backs.

Instead, teach employees to process each task as soon as it reaches them. If it’s an email: read, reply or file. If it’s a piece of paperwork, they should complete it, photocopy it or file it away. Whatever the task, when it comes across an employee’s desk, they should know how to handle it immediately.

Note that some tasks can’t be done at that moment, in which case processing it means filing it in the right place for later, then putting a date on the calendar for when it will be dealt with and how. Some tasks are also large, in which case processing can mean breaking the task into steps and waiting until there’s enough time to complete them. Whatever the case, ignoring the task is the No. 1 time-wasting no-no, so offer better alternatives.

  1. Have an End-Of-Day Routine

At the end of the day, teach each employee to create a short to-do list for the next, containing only the highest priority tasks, and unclutter their work space so it will be fresh and ready for the following day.

Time management doesn’t need to feel impossible when you institute these tips in every worker’s daily routine!

How to Set Performance Goals that Motivate Employees

How to Set Performance Goals that Motivate Employees

In today’s culture of goal setting and performance motivation, it is common for managers and employees to meet regularly and set improvement objectives. This practice isn’t new, but despite its solid history, many organizations still do it wrong. If you’re interested in setting performance goals that motivate employees to do their best, improve their output and quality, and remain loyal to your company, the tips below will help you do it.

Respect Intrinsic Employee Motivation

The reason the Internet is filled with advice about how to set and reach personal goals is that people are inherently motivated by their own desires. The ways in which they naturally want to improve, and the successes that fill them with pride and satisfaction, simply have more sway than metrics imposed top-down by a company.

Of course, part of running an effective team or organization is that you have to ensure employees meet the goals necessary to keep the company profitable. Nevertheless, there are various routes to the same goal, and talking with employees to find out how they learn, how they work best, what motivates them and what gives them satisfaction can all help you target the right goals in the right way.

Don’t Set Stretch Goals

Although goal-setting is a routine aspect of most management strategies, research hints at its destructive side. It’s bogus to say you shouldn’t set goals at all, but stretch goals may not be that helpful. These can add stress to employees’ lives, cause them to focus on certain goals to the detriment of others, add work to their coworkers’ plates, and sap motivation if they fail to meet them regularly. Instead, stick with in-between goals that challenge without running the risk of proving too arduous.

Choose Specific, Measurable Goals

Vague goals can be destructive. An employee who works in a call center benefits much more from the objective “Handle two more customer calls per hour” than “Improve your call time.” Always wondering whether or not they are meeting the goal can be stressful and draining to the employee, so be very clear.

Be sure to take into account both quantity and quality. It is unfair to set an employee up for a fall by focusing on one metric to the detriment of another. For example, in the case of customer calls, if you’re trying to up the employee’s number of calls, be clear on how to do this without sacrificing quality. Otherwise, you may have a worker with a higher number of completed calls and worse performance ratings. That’s no good for anyone.

Align to Overall Company Goals

A performance goal isn’t worth much if it caters to the employee’s strengths, desires and learning style, but does nothing to help the company itself. Therefore, any performance goals you and the employee choose must align to the company’s strategy for improvement. Success Factors recommends focusing employee efforts on company goals and clearly outlining the expected responsibilities associated with meeting them.

Plan How You Will Assess Goals

This is closely related to a step above – choosing specific goals – but is actually connected to how you will ascertain whether or not the employee is meeting the goals you’ve chosen. In order for a goal to be successful by truly motivating an employee, both you and the employee must know what the follow-through will look like.

Perhaps you schedule informal bimonthly reviews to talk about how it’s going, or perhaps you track stats in a spreadsheet, a program or an app. Maybe you randomly sit in on customer calls to check progress, or monitor the sales numbers. Such a plan lends the manager peace of mind and the employee motivation to succeed and security in knowing their strides will be recognized. Which brings us to …

Recognize Goals Regularly

No matter how well you target specific areas of improvement, align goals and create assessment plans, if you routinely fail to acknowledge employees’ progress, they are less likely to try. Unfortunately, after second grade, stickers and candy bars don’t work so well, so you’re best off finding a way to recognize employee successes that will be meaningful to the employee.

Be sure to take into account each individual’s personality and preferences when doing so. While some employees might feel gratified to be put on a project as a result of their hard work, others might feel punished by the increased workload. Similarly, while many people love validation in front of the group, others find it humiliating. If you’re not sure, ask.

Goal-setting, once you institute these tips into your routine practice, is an effective way to motivate employees and lend them a sense of achievement in their daily work lives. Doing it right will benefit you, them and the company, so don’t wait.