As a manager or business owner, one of your core responsibilities is to help your team be at the best and do more at work. This means you have to help them prioritize their work, help them optimize daily itinerary, matching them to a role based on their capability and making sure you are not getting in their way.

Yes, it’s easy to act on the contrary.

Without consideration of your intentions, it’s easy to neglect that every single thing you request them to do for the sake of productivity - whether to take up an ‘’urgent’’ assignment or to use a new tool or attend meetings to measure productivity or discuss strategy - all takes time.

Employees, time management might not be a top priority on your list of management priorities like increased sales, customer satisfaction, massive online presence or attracting investors, naturally, paying attention to your employee's time management goes beyond the personal issues to a business one. This is why you need to give it the necessary attention and solution.

Let’s consider a few ways employees struggle with time management and how you can be of immense help.


Give clear expectations and deadlines

Research has made it clear that the issue of time management with employees that most companies face is not always self-inflicted.

Pat Burns, in his book Master The Moment discovered that the issue of time management that employees face can be narrowed to[b] poor leadership[/b], including:

Not knowing what work to prioritize

Having trouble saying no even when their workload is full

Feeling overwhelmed with too many tasks

Procrastinating or not finishing what they start because timelines aren’t clearly set

Always being in reactive mode due to an unclear strategy

Scanning through the list, employees time management issues boil down to poor communication - Not knowing what task to work on, how well to spend their time and not knowing how to say ’no’

All you need to do is to shift your approach to ‘yes’ people. Companies naturally celebrate employees who ‘naturally get the job done.’ You would think that these people are hard workers or they are the crop of people with the right character. In actual sense, they are likely to be stressed and on the road to being exhausted.

Bruce Tulgan, author of Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, what you can do to circumvent employees' time management issues is to pay attention and then talk. Do they need your help? Do they understand what the deliverables are? Do you need to tweak the scope of their projects?

Create a 2-way communication channel to tell you where your expectations don’t match their reality. This should not be assumed as a failure. It is not on anyone’s part. It is just a way to foster the conversation around how well they can do their best work.

Continue reading here https://vanaplus.com.ng/blogs/news/ways-managers-can-help-solve-employee-time-management-issues

Nice piece