Productivity which is measured by the amount of work completed in a given amount of time is always one of the biggest concerns of any managers. Time is a precious resource and the more you can save, the higher your productivity and profitability are. Many companies reduce time consumption by recruiting talented employees or adapting modern equipment. Nevertheless, those treatments will raise the cost in other aspects like payroll and maintenance. Hence, what you really should do is trying to minimize factors killing your business’s time resource.
Social media
Social media is obviously a time killer not only at work but also in normal life. Not many businesses apply camera system or LAN internet management system to supervise their employee’s behaviors all the time. That is why, according to a research conducted by Sprout Social, about 66% of the US workers consume work time in social media like Facebook or Instagram. Moreover, the amount of time wasted might be up to one or two hours per day.
Some managers apply web blocker apps on office computers to prevent employees from going online from those computers. However, they forget that their staff still have smartphones with the 4G internet connection. The Camera system may have some help yet not all employees are willing to work under that strict supervision. It can even decrease their productivity.
Gossip
As costly as social media interactions, chit-chat during work time is also what you need to put under control. You do not hire machines, you hire people and whether they are productive or not, it is hard to work through a day without chatting with other colleagues. If there is no supervisor, your employees can gossip all day about anything even your personal life. And remember that not only talking out loud is chit chat. Texting or calling people outside the company is also a form of gossip.
According to a study by Harris posted on Forbes, calling and texting were listed as the top reason for time wasting by half of the participants, the following was gossip with over 40% respondent’s admittance. Of course, you want to prevent this situation. However, it is not easy at all. Your workers are human, they can not work in silence for 40 to 50 hours per week. Besides, no talking or texting means no communication between team members then how could teamwork be done? Thus, allow your employees to have some short break time during working hours to gossip anything they want and set clear work result requirements with daily to-do lists. This way they will save their stories for break time and focus on work completion.
It may not seem right to you that email is a time-wasting element. However, think about the number of useless emails you receive every day and the number of emails with endless word and no organization costing you time to filter necessary information. Emails from customers and coworkers are often not well organised and carefully prepared. There might be many mistakes and confusing information. You have no choice but to rearrange the whole email to get the necessary information yourself.
Fortunately, there are modern tools like Gmail Metric (https://gmailmetrics.com/) will help you analyse your business’s usage of email. Based on email analysis report, you will know how efficiently you are dealing with daily email. Then prepare specific plan to handle the situation to reduce time spent on email.
Meeting
Meetings are good and essential to all businesses with more than one person. However, abusing meetings will lead to a huge waste of time and human resource. A normal meeting may involve many staff and much time to prepare in advance. The point is some meetings are not necessary at all. Sometimes the manager gathers all staff in a room just to announce some news. Or sometimes the whole company have to stop all work to hear about jobs of only a team.
You need to consider carefully before holding a meeting. if a short notification on the board is enough, do not call on a meeting. If you only need to discuss with an employee, do not gather the whole team. Unless it is an unexpected or emergency situation, try to schedule upcoming meetings so that your staff can arrange their time reasonably without wasting working time.
Do not push too hard
Improving productivity and reducing wasted time do not mean that you should always keep a close eye on everything your employees do. This will help nothing but bring back reverse impacts. As mentioned before, you should give them some free space and time to catch a break. Small break time to check their phone and chit-chat with co-workers will help release the stress and refresh the mind to boost the productivity.
