Time Management – An Important Resource Often Overlooked by Employers

It is easy for small scale business owner to keep track of company’s resources such as capital, employees and facilities but what often seems ignored is employee’s time. Since time is difficult to quantify, business owners consider employee’s time as unlimited resource. It has been studied that people on a large scale are not satisfied with current time allocations as they are often wasted on trivial tasks like responding to mails and attending non-essential meetings. This calls for a change in existing corporate culture, as an effective time management is crucial for productivity and profitability of the business.

How to develop a culture that supports effective time management? Discussed below are certain factors that can be easily achieved by a time and attendance software in actively managing time of employees across the organization.

Employee Privacy
An employee in today’s corporate world is expected to handle multiple tasks at a go; therefore managers schedule a lot of projects, meetings and corporate activities within the work hours. But studies reveal that multitasking is ineffective and they do not lead to effective time management, rather they end up in poor organizational skills, employees often get distracted and tend to lose focus. It has been noticed that employees are far more productive when they enter a state of intense and effortless concentration and is called as flow. Keeping the employees in a flow mode is the mantra to improve productivity. Managers need to build an environment where silence and privacy is maintained and should also avoid the practice of overburdening employees with unnecessary emails and phone calls.

Few Yet Effective Meetings
The average corporate meetings often consume valuable time and also hinder the employee flow mode, without yielding much of desirable outcomes. Various surveys conclude that ineffective meetings tops the chart in wasting the average work week and moreover, employees end up spending almost six hours each week in meeting which are mostly voted as unproductive. Thus, it is important for managers / executives to schedule meetings that have specific purpose and should also have detailed agenda of issues to be discussed and the order and time allotted to each. Managers can gradually notice the positive change productivity by inculcating small changes like sending mails in case a meeting is conducted in order to impart information; also, many meetings could be made optional so as to avoid the interruption during critical flow mode of an employee.

Tracking of Time
Every organization has a defined goal and objective for future that guides an executive to move forward. It has been observed that having these long term objectives are not enough as most often executives get involved in day to day tasks and fall short of time in progressing towards the long term goals. This very reason gives rise to the need of electronic time tracker, which will capture costs as well as time spent for each project and will also yield an integrated information of company time allocation.