How can You Improve your Teams Time Management?
Managers play a significant role in improving their teams time management by reducing wasted working time, achieving more in less time, creating a productive and positive work environment, and creating high-performing teams. This can sound difficult and complicated but is actually easily achievable by making these small tweaks to working culture.
Time is valuable. Ask how it can be spent to achieve your goals.
By continuously confirming the work priorities, and differentiating between the urgent and the important, managers can help team members to invest their time more effectively and focus on the work that really matters. You can ask open questions such as, “What will help us to achieve what we need to deliver? What’s getting in the way?” to surface and resolve barriers within the team’s control.
Managers can help their team members to understand where is best to invest their time more effectively in order to focus on work that is most valuable to the business. This can be achieved by communicating business priorities and highlighting what is urgent and important.
Managers can help the team to work out what to prioritise by asking open-ended questions such as:
- What will help us to achieve what we need to deliver on?
- What is getting in the way of achieving this?
- How can we get past this?
Minimise unnecessary delegation and distractions to help employees to make the best use of their time.
By resourcing and commissioning work carefully, businesses can help employees to focus on more valuable work.
Work delegation needs to be exact and well-thought through. It’s important for senior staff to consider what skills are needed to complete the task efficiently and effectively, as well as how urgent it is, what the workload of the team is like and expectations of the work that you’re expecting to receive back.
Managers can also encourage teams to rework established team processes where there are signs of inefficiencies, deadline rushes or overlaps in responsibilities. This allows the team to think collaboratively about how to become productive as a collective group as well as independently.
Create healthy habits and environments that allow employees the opportunity to do their best work
To improve productivity and make your team more time-savvy, managers can facilitate team discussions about what makes up a productive and sustainable use of working time. This might look different for different employees, so it’s important that senior staff offer collaboration while respecting individuals’ working patterns. This helps to keep the team motivated and reach business goals.
Discussions could cover topics including:
- Communication channels
- Meeting goals and expectations
- Productive working environments
- How social time and downtime will be valued and more.
Investing in long-term careers and showing employees you care.
Career-committed organisations are re-thinking the way they recruit, manage, develop and reward their people. These organisations aim to manage performance continuously. You can start by defining what good performance looks like and how this can be measured – beware of falling into the trap of using time as an input metric here.
It’s important to pay equal attention to behavioural goals as well as financial or commercial goals; holding frequent, informal performance discussions and encouraging feedback can be a way to continuously monitor this. This can allow managers to understand how to improve progression by closing skill gaps over the coming year.
Career-committed organisations are also moving away from traditional ways of working and tailoring their approach to flexibility where possible. This shows to employees that you respect their work-life balance and allows you to show some flexibility which can allow them to work during hours they are most productive. Find out How to Hire a Successful Remote Team.
Value humanity and link time to physical, mental and social wellbeing.
Great managers don’t just manage the work, KPI’s and numbers. In organisations that are time-focused, managers are selected for their people skills and emotional intelligence. They listen well, include everyone, value different perspectives throughout decision-making processes and demonstrate empathy. They show that they value and care about their workforce by responding quickly to signs of overwork, isolation, anxiety or burnout among colleagues.
Evolve by Learning, Showing Open-Mindedness and Providing Recognition
As their role evolves from supervisor to coach and facilitator, managers can encourage teams to be curious and creative about work habits and outcomes by asking questions that cover:
- What are people finding works well?
- What people are finding difficult?
- Who or what can be done to help?
- What are people/ the business not paying sufficient attention to?
It is important to provide praise to team members in order for them to recognise that their efforts are appreciated which will help to continue the motivation and momentum to improving productivity and their working environment.
Need help?
T2M Talent Management Solutions offer management and executive mentoring to help develop your career, team and business. The advice and learning opportunities provide insight for members of senior leadership teams from outside their current businesses, as well as creating fantastic contacts for the future.
Want to find out more? Let’s have a conversation.
