Time Management In The Workplace – Does Our Haste Make Waste?
There is a joke about the Italian airline pilot (told by one of proud Italian descent) who announces during flight:
Folks I have a some a good a news and some a bad a news. The bad a news is we are a lost. The good a news is that we are a making a good time!
How often does your staff get so concentrated on the details of an assignment that their entire focus is on completion? Later, after a significant amount of work, you discover they veered off course and their efforts do not produce the desired product.
Employer and Employee Responsibilities
Management has a responsibility to produce a quality product as efficiently as possible.
As the employer or manager, when we assign a new project,
Do we make the task clear while also establishing the conditions (parameters for doing the work) and defining standards (project deliverables)?
Are we checking work in the early stages closely to ensure our staff is not straying off course?
Conversely, employees share responsibility for the effort. They have an obligation to tackle the task and produce the project deliverables within the guidelines set for performing the work.
For the most part, people do their best and make every effort to do the right thing. Leadership is about providing vision and influencing others. When we understand the importance of communication and communicate clearly, we exercise principles of time management by taking the most efficient path for task accomplishment.
Goal Setting and Feedback
Typically, managers perform their role in goal setting well, outlining the deliverables and ensuring the project starts off in the right direction. Too often, however, we get distracted with other requirements and forget how critical our role is in providing feedback. We want to believe everything was clearly understood, and therefore it must be going well.
Think about how coaches train young athletes; goal setting and feedback is critical to teaching the fundamentals such as dribbling a basketball. Coaches must make the initial investment to train their players properly. When they take the time to ensure understanding up front and follow-up to ensure proper execution, they are able to concentrate on more complex tasks with greater ease.
Apply the same principles to your team; ensure the basic fundamentals of the project are understood by each member and follow-up.
Importance of Time Management
Ensure your staff does not veer off course, which only leads to frustration for all parties in the end.
Leaders can increase efficiency by investing the extra time in coaching and guiding their staff. This may require more time reviewing or monitoring during the initial project stages to ensure they are headed in the right direction, but the return on investment yields great dividends in terms of employee loyalty and accomplishing project deliverables.
Tom Crea has been developing leaders for more than 20 years. If you would like to know more about a values-based approach to leading, building teams, and improving communication, visit Tom's website at www.all-about-leadership.com. For one-on-one coaching, contact Tom at www.all-about-leadership.com/contact.html.
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